Fear of a Blank Planet | Full Band Cover | Porcupine Tree

The very first ‪@PorcupineTreeOfficial‬ I ever listened to is none other than the title track of their landmark album, Fear of a Blank Planet. When I first listened to it, I thought it sounded like a fairly benign modern rock song. It was only after repeated listens that I realized what an astonishing work of musical genius it is, thanks to ‪@StevenWilsonHQ‬ 's layered production, Gavin Harrison's barely noticeable time signature changes, Richard Barbieri's synth textures and Colin Edwin's fuzzed-out bass. It was the song that showed me that progressive rock could be complex without the mind-twisting virtuosity you'd see in bands like Yes and Dream Theater. After seeing the band perform the song live in 2022, I found the spark to put my own spin on it.

Every cover I do presents new lessons in music arrangement and production. In the case of Fear of a Blank Planet, I learned that, contrary to how I typically mix guitars and bass, much of the song's power comes from giving the guitars a massive bottom end when they explode in after the first verse. Conversely, the bass needed to have an unusual amount of top end distortion that would blend in with the guitars to create a massive, singular rhythm section. By running a parallel bass track with wavefolding distortion, I found that this made the bass maintain a clean and punchy bottom end with a buzzy top end that didn't get drowned out.

For the video, I included footage of the third-person shooter Control by ‪@RemedyGames‬. The game features this song during the end credits, which gave me this particular idea, and in my view the surreal, quasi-science fiction aesthetic of Control goes perfectly with the song.


Check out the Gothik Serpent discography: https://gothikserpent.bandcamp.com/

Kerwin Tsang - Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Synth Programming, Mixing, Video
Tau Bowyer - Drums, Mastering, Camera
Olivia Jean Kong - Vocals

Additional Personnel
Don Tan - Camera