If progressive rock has a modern-day poster boy, Steven Wilson is it — unquestionably if perhaps reluctantly. Porcupine Tree, which Wilson sparked in 1987 as a friendly hoax, was a major-league band with a global following by the time it went on hiatus in 2010. Meanwhile, Wilson delved deftly into electronic pop, ambient music, metal, and more in a bewildering parade of side projects. And his remixes of classic prog LPs by King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, and their like have yielded breathtaking results, prising new details from aged grooves.
Since 2008, Wilson — who is 47 and lives in England — has worked under his own name, releasing ambitious conceptual albums recorded with top-flight musicians and accompanied by elaborate multimedia elements: short stories, illustrations, video, and Web components. His latest, “Hand. Cannot. Erase.” — which Wilson will showcase in a sold-out concert at Berklee Performance Center on Friday — was inspired by the true story of a London woman who withdrew from public life so completely that after she died in her apartment in 2003, two years passed before her body was discovered.
In a phone interview, Wilson described how this woman’s story synched up with his notions about alienation, nostalgia, and the possibility of disappearing in a teeming city.
Q. Why did Joyce Carol Vincent’s story resonate so strongly for you?
A. Her story, for me, became symbolic of something about what it means to be living in the heart of the city in the 21st century, and how that kind of ultimately taps into many other things that fascinate me. Things like how the Internet and social networking have affected human connection — or disconnection, as the case may be — like nostalgia for childhood, like fear and confusion living in the city, and the way that she was able, effectively, to erase herself —
Q. Isn’t social media a means by which people not only connect to friends,
but also link up with a wider span of people than most of us manage in real life? Certainly that’s the attractive
illusion . . .
A. That’s the problem for me — that it is an illusion: the illusion of friends, the illusion of being connected, the illusion of social interaction.
Q. Your character keeps a diary, but this is the 21st century, so she does it as a blog. Isn’t that just one more way in which we shape and perform the character that we want the world to see?
A. Not only that, she is completely isolated, so the only real way for me to be able to communicate what she’s thinking, her emotional state, is through some kind of internal dialogue — but of course, you can no more trust that internal dialogue than you can trust any piece of fiction.
Q. Did you do anything special to get inside a female character’s head?
A. Not consciously. Every character that you create, whether you’re a writer, a filmmaker, a musician, ultimately becomes you anyway. If you want people to believe in a character that you’ve created, you have to invest that character with your own feelings, your own autobiography, your own experiences, your own history, your own memories.
Q. Prog rock typically gets characterized as male-only territory, but “Hand. Cannot. Erase.” features the widest variety of styles — pure pop and electronica along with the heavy and proggy stuff — you’ve ever featured on a single record. Did a female protagonist necessitate adjusting your sound?
A. I don’t think it’s to do with the fact she’s a female — for me, the concept always is responsible for the musical palette. The previous album that I made, “The Raven That Refused to Sing,” was an album where the underlying concept was basically this idea of the classical ghost story, with a kind of emphasis on late-19th-century, early-20th-century so-called “Gothic” fiction. That suggested to me a more vintage musical palette. Now, here’s a concept that is completely set in the heart of the city in the 21st century. Straightaway to me that says, OK, you’re going to need more electronic sounds, almost semi-industrial sound design, if you want to accurately reflect life in the heart of a metropolis. That stylistic range, and the fact that it is quite distinctly different from the previous record, ultimately grew out of the story.
Q. Bands like the ones that your character names in “Perfect Life” — Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil — seem to have had an effect on the music.
A. Absolutely. That song, 60 percent of that dialogue is completely taken from my own life. I think most people associate me with the grand tradition of ’70s conceptual rock music; actually, the truth is I grew up in the ’80s, and I was listening to bands like the Cure, the Smiths, Joy Division, XTC, Tears for Fears. Those things have always been there, part of my musical DNA, and they come out more so when the story line resonates more with that particular time.
Interview was condensed and edited. Steve Smith can be reached at steven.smith@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @nightafternight.