Pitchblack Playback - Steven Wilson

"Swirl in a lark’s eye, sparks alive her swooping soul…“

If Steven Wilson’s eighth album The Overview explored the depths, distances, and desolation of deep space, Requiem For A Village narrows its focus to a tiny, unknown corner of the British Isles. It steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, setting down in a village that exists beyond time and place.

In imagining a realm entirely divorced from modernity — and in creating music that willingly embraces both the macabre and the possibilities of studio mistakes— Wilson adopted a similarly unorthodox recording approach. Eschewing AI and corrective studio technologies, he turned instead to organic instrumentation (whether pristine or imperfect), embracing mistakes to see where they might lead. Recorded with regular collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine and drummer Russell Holzman (on the tracks Requiem For A Village, Now Departing, A Basket Of Bees and Wheel), the album is intimate, ambitious, richly imaginative, and knowingly eccentric, featuring a hugely compelling narration written by Andy Partridge (XTC) and voiced by one of the country’s finest actors, David Tennant.

Set in a Wicker Man landscape where the paintings of Stanley Spencer hang in the local art gallery, the stories of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood sit on the shelves of the public library, and the children of the stones play in the market square, Requiem For A Village is a sepia-toned snapshot of a hidden neverland — a 54-minute piece of cinema for the ears.

“…you will all blow away, dandelion sneeze/the hills will grow higher, with each dying breeze.“

Released via Fiction Records, 6th November 2026