Insignificance (Porcupine Tree album)
| Signify | ||||
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| Studio album by Porcupine Tree | ||||
| Released | September 1996 | |||
| Recorded | No Man's Land, Hemel Hempstead, The Doghouse, Henley, Katrina & the Waves' Studio, Cambridge 1995-1996 |
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| Genre | Progressive rock, psychedelic rock, space rock, krautrock | |||
| Length | 61:56 | |||
| Label | Delerium | |||
| Porcupine Tree chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Signify | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Sputnik Music | |
| DPRP |   |
Signify is the fourth studio album by British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. It was released in September 1996 and later re-released in 2003 with a second disc of demos, which had previously been released on the b-side cassette tape Insignificance, and a third time, on vinyl, on 9 May 2011. It was the first album that frontman Steven Wilson recorded with the band on board from the beginning; previous albums had been essentially solo efforts with occasional help from other musicians.
Signify was the first Porcupine Tree album recorded as a full band unit, rather than primarily by frontman Steven Wilson with occasional assistance from other musicians, primarily the ones who would become full-time band members as of this album; Richard Barbieri, Colin Edwin, and Chris Maitland. In 1995, the band would alternate between touring in support of their last release, The Sky Moves Sideways, and writing and recording the album, with Wilson describing it as "The album was recorded in quite a piecemeal way with tracks written and recorded in batches of 2 or 3, followed by gaps of up to 3 months." As such, a number of the songs, albeit in early forms, were debuted live before the album's release.
Edwin would admit that while Wilson allowed him a lot of freedom with his bass parts, sometimes Wilson would simply replace his demo takes with Wilson's own work on the final version, as was the case with the tracks "Sever" and "Dark Matter". Barbieri's goals for his contributions during the Signify sessions were "...to use what in isolation would be a weird and abstract sound or texture and to make it work in the context of a pop song".
Wilson said of the recording process:
"Signify was slightly odd in the way it was recorded in the sense that although it is a band album, because we were never able to actually all be in the same room at the same time, because of physical limitations, with the exception of one track, "Intermediate Jesus", which was done outside, I tended to demo the tracks to a fairly high level and they would just replace the parts that I'd played on synthesizers with the real thing. So there wasn't a great deal of input from the other guys."
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Wikipedia