Porcupine Tree drummer, Gavin Harrison, widely acknowledged as one of the finest drummers on the planet, has teamed up with Yahoo! Music to launch a music video for “Hatesong/Halo,” taken from his upcoming solo album, Cheating the Polygraph. Stream the new music video exclusively here.
Harrison told Yahoo! Music: “Music is about listening and opening your mind. Feel the world around you. Don’t get distracted by letting your eyes focus on unrelated things. Let the music create the images in your mind.”
Cheating the Polygraph, an ambitious project which sees the restlessly creative Harrison reimagine eight Porcupine Tree songs in a set of vivid and vibrant new arrangements that give full, free rein to his inquiring musical mind, will release on April 13 via Kscope (April 14 in the USA/Canada, April 17 in Germany, April 22 in Japan).
The tracks which comprise the album were recorded over a five-year period, with Harrison working in conjunction with a crew of some of the finest contemporary musicians, including the gifted saxophonist Nigel Hitchcock along with bassist Laurence Cottle. It’s a set that will no doubt excite much controversy; Harrison’s use of the ‘Big Band’ musical sound stage isn’t some ersatz attempt to make a ‘Swing’ album; it’s closer in execution and arrangement to the innovative works of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention – a layered, richly-textured selection that is both beautifully-recorded and incisively delivered.
“I think every album needs a focus – a master plan – and whilst I thought about writing new tunes for a big band project, I made a version of Porcupine Tree’s ‘Futile’ (with Laurence Cottle) and it came out really well,” commented Harrison. “It felt like a good plan to follow on with some of my personal favorite PT songs and see if we could make them work. I had a vision that the arrangements would never lean towards a clichéd classic big band sound, but always follow a modern contemporary angle. So even if you didn’t know the original tune, you could still enjoy it as a modern composition that would work with this instrumentation. I couldn’t be happier with the results. Laurence Cottle’s immense talent as a musician and arranger was mind blowing.”
No respecter of arbitrary musical pigeonholing, Harrison doesn’t so much ignore genre confines as smash right through them – Harrison states in his thoughtful liner notes: “It’s very important to me to push the boundaries of music whilst respecting what came before. In the arrangements of these pieces we really get ‘out there’ with some of the harmonies and rhythms, and we vastly extended the edges of the original compositions.”
Gavin Harrison – Cheating the Polygraph (Q&A with Gavin and Laurence Cottle) from Kscope on Vimeo.
