title: Parler

text: Parler was founded by John Matze Jr. and Jared Thomson in Henderson, Nevada, in August 2018. The company's name was taken from the French word , meaning "to speak". The name was originally intended to be pronounced as in French (, ), but is now pronounced as the English word "parlor" ( ). "The Wall Street Journal" first reported in November 2020 that conservative investor Rebekah Mercer had funded Parler, and Mercer has since been revealed to have been a co-founder of the company. According to Mercer, she co-founded Parler to counter the "ever-increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords". Thomson serves as the chief technology officer, and Matze was Parler's chief executive officer from its founding until January 2021. Both are alumni of the University of Denver computer science program, and were roommates while in college. Some other Parler senior staff also attended the school.


title: Parler

text: Parler launched in August 2018, billing itself as an unbiased and free speech alternative to larger social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. The service was relatively unknown until a December 2018 tweet by conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens brought 40,000 new users to Parler, causing Parler's servers to malfunction. The service initially attracted some Republican personalities, including then-Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, Utah Senator Mike Lee, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, as well as some who had been banned from other social media networks, such as right-leaning activists and commentators Gavin McInnes, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Reuters wrote that Parler had "mostly been a home for supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump" until June 2019. Matze told the news organization that although he had originally intended Parler to be bipartisan, he had focused its marketing efforts toward conservatives as they began to join the service.


title: Parler

text: In May 2019, Parler had 100,000 users. In June 2019, Parler said its user base more than doubled after around 200,000 accounts from Saudi Arabia signed up to the network. Largely supporters of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the users migrated from Twitter after alleging they were experiencing censorship on the platform. Although Twitter did not acknowledge removing posts by Saudi users that might have triggered the exodus, the company had previously deactivated hundreds of accounts that had been supportive of the Saudi government, which Twitter had described as "inauthentic" accounts in an "electronic army" pushing the Saudi government's agenda. The influx of new accounts to Parler caused some service interruptions, making the site at times unusable. Parler described the Saudi accounts as part of "the nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia", and encouraged other users to welcome them to the service. Some of the Saudi users tweeted the '#MAGA' hashtag and photos of President Trump with the Saudi royal family in order to curry favor with the Trump-supporting and far-right users on the service. The Saudi accounts found a mixed reception among the existing user base; though some welcomed the Saudi users, others made Islamophobic remarks, and some expressed beliefs that the new accounts were bots.


title: Parler

text: Parler experienced a surge in signups in mid-2020. In May, Twitter sparked outrage among President Trump and his supporters when it flagged some of the president's tweets about mail-in ballots as "potentially misleading", and a tweet regarding the George Floyd protests as "glorifying violence". In response, Parler published a "Declaration of Internet Independence" modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence, and began using the "#Twexit" hashtag (a portmanteau of "Twitter" and "Brexit"). Describing Twitter as a "Tech Tyrant" that censored conservatives, the campaign encouraged Twitter users to migrate to Parler. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino announced on June 16 that he had purchased an "ownership stake" in Parler, in an effort to "fight back against" what he described as "Tech Tyrants" Facebook and Twitter. Parscale, who at the time was managing the Trump campaign, endorsed Parler in a tweet on June 18, also writing, "Hey @twitter your days are numbered", and including a screenshot of a tweet from President Trump which Twitter had flagged as "manipulated media".


title: Parler

text: On June 19, right-wing English media personality Katie Hopkins was permanently suspended from Twitter for violating their policies on "hateful conduct". An account falsely claiming to be hers appeared on Parler shortly after the ban, and was quickly verified by Parler. After collecting $500 in donations solicited on Parler to purportedly sue Twitter over the ban, Parler removed the impersonator account. A Twitter account affiliating itself with the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the imposture on June 20, and said they would donate the money they had collected to Black Lives Matter groups, a movement Hopkins had mocked in the past. Parler's then-CEO Matze made a public apology, with Parler acknowledging that the impersonator had been "verified by an employee improperly". Hopkins herself joined Parler on June 20, with Matze posting that he had personally verified her account. The incident drew some attention to Parler within the United Kingdom. Thirteen Members of Parliament had joined as of June 23, and some British right-wing and conservative activists endorsed the service over Twitter.


title: Parler

text: On June 24, 2020, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that the Trump campaign was looking for alternatives to social media networks that had restricted their posts and advertising, and that Parler was being considered. Beginning in mid-2020, Parler negotiated with The Trump Organization, offering a 40% stake in the social network in exchange for Trump making Parler his primary social media platform. As a part of the deal, Trump would have had to post all his content to Parler at least four hours before publishing it to other networks. According to Michael Wolff, Trump representatives also included the condition that Parler ban anyone speaking negatively about Trump, which Parler did not accept. The White House Counsel's office reportedly halted the negotiations on the grounds that such a partnership would violate ethics rules as long as Trump was president. The general counsel for the nonpartisan watchdog non-profit Project On Government Oversight, Scott Amey, said there ought to be an "immediate criminal investigation" into the Trump administration over the negotiations.


title: Parler

text: Texas Senator Ted Cruz published a YouTube video on June 25, in which he denounced other social media platforms for "flagrantly silencing those with whom they disagree" and announced that he was "proud to join Parler". Other prominent Republican and conservative figures also joined in June, including Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, New York Representative Elise Stefanik, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.


title: Parler

text: Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing President of Brazil, joined Parler on July 13; Four months earlier in March 2020, Twitter had removed some of President Bolsonaro's posts for violating their rules on spreading disinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in July, his son Flávio Bolsonaro had endorsed Parler on Twitter. As a result, Parler experienced a wave of signups from Brazil in July. According to "Bloomberg News" on July 15, 2020, Brazilian users made up over half of all Parler signups that month.


title: Parler

text: On October 1, 2020, Reuters reported that people associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, a group known for their interference in the 2016 presidential election, had been operating social media accounts on both mainstream and alt-tech platforms. One of the accounts, named Leo, identified in an FBI probe as a "key asset in an alleged Russian disinformation campaign", had been spreading "familiar and completely false" information, including claims that mail-in voting was prone to fraud, that President Trump was infected with coronavirus by leftist activists, and that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was a "sexual predator". "Axios" reported that the account had not found much of an audience on mainstream platforms, but had caught on among the alt-tech platforms; the Twitter account had fewer than 200 followers, but had 14,000 on Parler. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all took actions to suspend the accounts from their platforms. "The Washington Post" reported on October7 that Parler had declined to terminate the account after being informed of its connections to the disinformation organization, stating they did not need to act because they had not been contacted directly by U.S. law enforcement.


title: Parler

text: Also in October, as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube acted to ban content supporting the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, thousands of QAnon proponents migrated to Parler. Similar actions by Facebook against organizations promoting violence prompted some members of the Proud Boys and adherents of the boogaloo movement to move to Parler.


title: Parler

text: Parler experienced a wave of signups following the 2020 U.S. presidential election from American conservatives, concerned that their postsor those of other conservatives on mainstream social networkswould be affected by the platforms' efforts to quash misinformation about the election. The app was downloaded nearly a million times in the week following Election Day on November 3, and rose to the top of both the Apple App Store's and the Google Play Store's lists of most popular free apps. Following the election, "The Verge" reported that Parler had become a "central hub for many of the conservative protests against recent election results", including the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory, which alleged widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The surge had largely abated by December 2020, with downloads of the app returning to numbers similar to before the election. According to findings from Stanford researchers published on January 28, 2021, Parler registered 7,029 new users per minute during the election.


title: Parler

text: A verified account on Parler claiming to be Ron Watkins, the former site administrator of 8chan and son of 8chan owner Jim Watkins, made several posts on November 15, 2020, appearing to confirm theories that his father was Q, the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. It was later determined that security researcher Aubrey Cottle had taken advantage of Parler security flaws to change the name of an already-verified Parler account, giving it the appearance of belonging to and having been verified as Watkins. This incident led to a feud between Watkins and Parler investor Dan Bongino, with Watkins publicly criticizing Parler's security on Twitter and describing the service as "compromised". Bongino responded by tweeting insults at Watkins.


title: Parler

text: Parler was among the social media services used to plan the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. On January 2, Parler notified the FBI about material that Parler's lawyers found sufficiently alarming to warrant law enforcement attention, including posts by a user who declared that January 6 would be "the final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill". On January 5, the Secret Service warned the Capitol Police about an individual who intended to attend the rally and incite violence, and whose Parler posts included threats of violence against police. Mentions of "civil war" on Parler increased fourfold in the hours just prior to the storming. According to "BuzzFeed News", after the riot at the Capitol, Parler had been "overrun" with death threats, encouragement of violence, and calls for Trump supporters to join another armed march on Washington, D.C. on the day before the inauguration of Joe Biden. Activists, including Sleeping Giants, and employees of technology companies that had been providing services to Parler began to pressure those companies, which included Google, Apple, and Amazon, to deny service to Parler.


title: Parler

text: Parler experienced a wave of downloads after Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump from their platform due to his remarks about the storming of the Capitol. This led Parler to become the top downloaded app on the Apple App Store on January 8.


title: Parler

text: On January 8, two days after the storming of the Capitol, Google announced that it was pulling Parler from the Google Play Store, contending that its lack of "moderation policies and enforcement" posed a "public safety threat". Also on January 8, Apple informed Parler that they had received complaints about its role in the coordination of the riot in Washington D.C., the existence of "objectionable content" on the service, and that they had observed that "the app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities," in violation of Parler's own guidelines forbidding such content. Apple requested Parler submit a "moderation improvement plan" within 24 hours or face removal from the App Store. On Parler, Matze posted that Parler would not "cave to pressure", and accused Apple of being anti-competitive. Apple followed through with their warning the next day, removing Parler from the App Store on January 9. Ahead of the shutdown, some Parler users issued calls for violence and armed protests at state capitols and circulated conspiracy theories about Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook later explained that in the company's view, "free speech and incitement of violence" do not have "an intersection". Cloud communications company Twilio ended service to Parler, which made the service's two-factor authentication system stop working; Okta also denied them access to their identity management service, resulting in Parler losing access to some of their software tools. In addition, the database company ScyllaDB terminated its relationship with Parler, who had been using Scylla's Enterprise database.


title: Parler

text: On January 9, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, effective at 11:59p.m. PST the next day. Echoing Google's rationale for dropping its version of the Parler app, Amazon said Parler's failure to police violent content made the site "a very real risk to public safety". Parler went offline when Amazon withdrew its cloud computing services as scheduled. On January 11, Parler sued Amazon under antitrust law, saying the suspension of services was "apparently motivated by political animus", and had been carried out with the intention of benefiting Twitter by reducing competition. U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled in Amazon's favor ten days later. Parler also denied Amazon's claims that it failed to properly moderate content. On March 2, Parler withdrew a federal antitrust lawsuit they had filed against Amazon two months prior, but filed a new lawsuit against the company in state court. The new lawsuit alleged Amazon had breached terms in their contract and defamed Parler. Amid the lawsuit, in mid-April 2021, Amazon accused Parler of trying to conceal its ownership. On September 17, 2021, Seattle federal district Judge Barbara Rothstein approved Parler's request that its complaint against Amazon be heard in King County Superior Court.


title: Parler

text: Some applauded the technology companies' decisions to deny service to Parler. Others raised concerns about private enterprises determining what remains online. Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told "The New York Times" that he was concerned about neutrality when it came to Internet infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS and app stores. Evelyn Douek, a lecturer and content moderation researcher at Harvard Law School, told "The Wall Street Journal" she thought an argument could be made to defend the infrastructure providers' decision to deny service to platforms who do not adequately moderate content, but wondered if similar amounts of violent content might exist elsewhere in platforms they were serving. Paul Levinson, a professor at Fordham University, wrote in "The Conversation" that although he believed the de-platforming violated the "spirit of the First Amendment", it was warranted due to the incitement to violence on the Parler site.


title: Parler

text: After the shutdown, Parler users were reported to have migrated to other alt-tech websites including BitChute, Clapper, CloutHub, DLive, Gab, MeWe, Minds, Rumble, and Wimkin, as well as encrypted messaging services including Telegram and Signal.


title: Parler

text: Following the storming of the Capitol and just before Parler went offline, a researcher scraped roughly eight terabytes of public Parler posts. The posts scraped made up 99% of publicly-accessible Parler posts, including more than a million videos, which maintained GPS metadata identifying the exact locations where the videos were recorded. The researcher said her intention was to make a public record of "very incriminating" evidence against those who took part in the storming. The data dump was posted online, and the researcher has said the data will eventually be made available by the Internet Archive. According to "Ars Technica" and "Wired", the reason the researcher was able to scrape the data so easily was because the Parler website had poor coding and poor security. According to "Wired", although all posts downloaded by the researcher were public, because Parler did not scrub metadata, GPS coordinates of many users' homes had likely been exposed. As of January 15, 2021, "Gizmodo" had mapped out the locations of around 70,000 of the GPS coordinates linked to videos scraped from Parler. Videos scraped from Parler were used as evidence during the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.


title: Parler

text: On January 21, 2021, the chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Carolyn Maloney, called for an FBI probe into Parler, including its role in the storming of the Capitol. Maloney said her committee intends to open an investigation into Parler. On February 8, 2021, the committee asked Parler for information relating to who owns or has funded the company, any business ties to Russia, and its alleged offer of an ownership interest in the company to former president Donald Trump during his term.


title: Parler

text: On August 27, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the storming of the Capitol demanded records from Parler (alongside 14 other social media companies) going back to the spring of 2020.


title: Parler

text: Parler's board, led by Rebekah Mercer, dismissed John Matze from his role as Parler's CEO on January 29. Matze sent a memo to Parler staff in which he said that "I did not participate in this decision" to terminate him and that he had "met constant resistance to [his] product vision, [his] strong belief in free speech and [his] view of how the Parler site should be managed". In interviews following his firing, Matze noted that his termination may have been related to a dispute within the company regarding his belief that the company needed to "crack down" on domestic terrorism and violence and be "a little more pragmatic while still respecting free speech", but he was "not exactly sure" why he had been fired. Matze also said his suggestion to implement a moderation policy to remove extremist content was overruled by Mercer.


title: Parler

text: Amy Peikoff, Parler's Chief Policy Officer, provided a statement to Fox News in which she disputed Matze's memo to staff as "inaccurate and misleading", though she did not specify to which statements she was objecting. Parler investor Dan Bongino published a video on Facebook after Matze's departure, accusing Matze of "really bad decisions" leading to Parler being taken offline and causing app stability issues, and saying that Matze "decided to make this public, not us. We were handling it like gentlemen."


title: Parler

text: On February 19, Parler briefly banned Matze's account before restoring it later that day after "BuzzFeed News" contacted a Parler spokesperson about the banning. This banning came after Matze made a post on Parler asking his followers what they thought the "fair market value" of the company was.


title: Parler

text: On March 22, in Clark County, Nevada, Matze filed a lawsuit against Parler's board, alleging that Rebekah Mercer and Parler's board members engaged in a scheme to steal Matze's share in Parler.


title: Parler

text: Matze wrote in a Parler post on January9 that Parler could be unavailable for a week as they worked to "rebuild from scratch" and move to a new service provider. In an interview with Fox News on January 10, Matze said Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, contradicting a previous Parler post in which he had said many vendors were vying for their business. He also said others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day." Interviewed by Reuters on January 13, Matze said he did not know if or when Parler would return to operation. On January 17, Matze posted a message on the site's homepage, promising to "welcome all of you back soon". Matze also claimed that Parler could be back online by the end of January.


title: Parler

text: According to a January 12 "Wall Street Journal" report, other cloud hosting platforms that could potentially host Parler would be Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or the Oracle Cloud platform. As of publication, Parler had not contacted Microsoft, and would not be using Oracle for cloud hosting; Google declined to comment, but the "Journal" noted that Google had denied Parler a position in the Play Store. The "Journal" also noted that Parler could consider using smaller cloud hosting companies, but that some technologists doubted such companies' ability to provide stable hosting to such a heavily used service. One such smaller provider, DigitalOcean, let it be known that they would not accept Parler as a customer.


title: Parler

text: On January 10, Parler transferred their domain name registration to Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company known for hosting far-right websites such as Gab and "Infowars". "Vice" noted that through this move, Amazon Web Services was again indirectly providing services to Parler, as Epik uses AWS to host many of their DNS servers. On January 17, Parler brought their website back online, hosting only a static page without any of the functionality of the Parler service. Parler's web hosting provider was unknown, but it was noted that they were receiving protection from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from the Russian-owned cloud services company DDoS-Guard. This move was criticized in "The New York Times" and "Wired" as routing traffic through Russia, and may enable the Russian government to surveil Parler's users and provide data to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Both Epik and DDoS-Guard said they were not providing Parler with webhosting.


title: Parler

text: The Parler service returned online for existing users on February 15, with a redesigned website and logo, and said they would open the service to new signups the following week. Parler posts from before the service went offline are no longer available. Parler announced that their redesigned site will monitor violent content with human and artificial intelligence and that they will hide posts that attack a person based on sex, sexual orientation, race, or religion with a "trolling filter", however, users are allowed to click through the filter and view the content. Parler's new host is SkySilk Cloud Services, a web infrastructure company based in Los Angeles who said of their hosting of Parler that "Skysilk does not advocate nor condone hate, rather, it advocates the right to private judgment and rejects the role of being the judge, jury, and executioner." SkySilk also said they believe Parler is "taking the necessary steps to better monitor its platform". Mercer helped finance Parler's return online.


title: Parler

text: On February 25, Apple denied Parler's request to be re-added to the App Store, concluding that the changes Parler had made to their terms of service were not adequate. Apple added that "simple searches reveal highly objectionable content, including easily identified offensive uses of derogatory terms regarding race, religion and sexual orientation, as well as Nazi symbols" on the service.


title: Parler

text: In late March, Parler claimed in a letter to the House Oversight Committee that "in the days and weeks leading up to January 6th, Parler referred violent content from its platform to the FBI for investigation over 50 times, and Parler even alerted law enforcement to specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol."


title: Parler

text: A modified version of the Parler app was released on the App Store on May 17. It blocks posts identified by Parler as "hate", though they are still available on the web and on other versions of Parler. The app also includes additional features for reporting "threat[s] and incitement".


title: Parler

text: In August, Parler CEO George Farmer asked for an apology from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and others after a Reuters report said that the FBI found little evidence that the storming of the Capitol was planned and organized in advance.


title: Parler

text: On September 14, Parler announced that they would sponsor NASCAR Xfinity Series driver J. J. Yeley's No. 17 car during a race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway later in September.


title: Parler

text: On December 20, Parler announced that they would expand their business into non-fungible tokens (NFTs).


title: Parler

text: On January 5, 2022, left-leaning liberal think tank New America released a report titled "Parler and the Road to the Capitol Attack". According to "Mother Jones", the report is "a deep and retrospective dive through an estimated 183 million now-public posts" on Parler that discusses Parler's role in the 2021 Capitol attack and the platform's role in the spread of disinformation.


title: Parler

text: On January 11, a ransomware group joined Parler and started using the platform to aid its extortion efforts. Prior to joining Parler, the group had accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, which were both removed.


title: Parler

text: On January 22, Farmer claimed that Parler was "unfairly scapegoated" in the aftermath of the Capitol attack and alleged there was a conspiracy against him by Big Tech companies.


title: Parler

text: On February 9, Parler announced that former First Lady Melania Trump would exclusively use Parler for communications and that the platform would become her "social media home".


title: Parler

text: In late June, Tampa Bay lawyer Dale Golden filed a lawsuit against Parler after receiving unsolicited promotional text messages from Parler and alleged that the platform had violated Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act (FTSA).


title: Parler

text: On September 2, Parler's app became available again on Google Play Store, after Parler reportedly agreed to moderate posts that are shown in the Android version of the app.


title: Parler

text: Also in September, Parler announced a restructuring of their platform and company that would focus on providing services to businesses that have the potential of being forced off the Internet for hosting controversial content. Parler also announced the creation of a new parent company, Parlement Technologies Inc. Parlement announced the purchase of Dynascale Inc., a cloud service provider.


title: Parler

text: On October 17, Parler's parent company stated that Kanye West had agreed to buy ownership of the platform. This came after West was blocked from Instagram and Twitter for antisemitic remarks. The deal was expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2022, but was terminated in December by mutual agreement. Following the buyout announcement, it was revealed that Parler had accidentally doxxed its VIP members in its announcement of West's purchase, having publicly posted over 300 email addresses of its VIP members.


title: Parler

text: Parler had fewer than a million users until early 2020. In the last week of June 2020, it was estimated that the Parler app had more than 1.5 million daily users. , Parler had 2.8 million total users and had been downloaded 2.5 million times, nearly half of which were in June. Throughout June and July, Parler on several occasions was highly listed both on the Apple App Store and on the Google Play store, in various categories and overall. The Parler app was downloaded nearly a million times in the week following Election Day in the United States on November 3, and became the most popular free app both on the Apple App Store and on the Google Play Store. Parler remained the most downloaded app in the United States for five days in early November. "The New York Times" reported that Parler had added 3.5 million users in a single week, and during that month the service had about four million active users, and more than ten million total. In December 2020, Parler had around 2.3 million daily active users. "Fast Company" reported that, as of December 5, both the number of daily active users and the rate of new downloads had dropped from their November peak, and CNN reported on December 10 that downloads had "plummeted" and were returning to the numbers Parler was experiencing before the election. Parler again topped the App Store downloads chart on January 8, 2021, shortly after then-President Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and also shortly before Parler was removed from the App Store by Apple. As of January 2021, Parler reported having 15 million total users. According to Sensor Tower, Parler has received 11.3 million global downloads from both the App Store and the Play Store. Also according to Sensor Tower, app downloads for Parler had dropped from 517,000 in December 2020 to 11,000 in June 2021.


title: Parler

text: Despite the wave in signups in mid-2020, and the larger surge in November of that year, some journalists and researchers expressed doubt that Parler will remain popular or enter mainstream usage. According to "TheWrap", after several weeks of more than 700,000 downloads a week, Parler's weekly downloads subsided back into the low 100,000s during mid-July. "Bloomberg News" also reported that downloads of the app had substantially slowed following the initial mid-2020 wave, and described Parler's June download numbers as a "small fraction" of apps like TikTok, which receives tens of millions of downloads a month. Parler's user base, though it grew substantially in mid- and late 2020, remained much smaller than its competitors'. , Twitter had 187 million users a day and Facebook had 1.8 billion users a day, whereas Parler had four million active users and eight million total. "Slate" wrote that alternative social networks like Parler "normally... just don't get that big." When Parler's download and usage activity diminished following the November surge in popularity, the vice president of insights at the app analytics company Apptopia said to CNN, "The data trends resemble a fad, and a short-lived one at that... Parler had a very good spike. People were interested, it's in the news, it receives downloads... But it appears, in our data, that there is no staying power."


title: Parler

text: Although some high-profile figures have created accounts on Parler, many of them remain more active, and have substantially larger follower bases, on mainstream social networks. "Mic" questioned how long Parler's spike in popularity would last, citing as an obstacle the reluctance among those with large Twitter followings to migrate to a new service. "The Daily Beast" noted in July and October 2020 that many high-profile conservatives who opened accounts on Parler in the previous month had since stopped using the service, while remaining active on mainstream social networks. Some have described Parler as a backup in case Twitter bans them. CNN interviewed Trump supporters in December 2020 about their social media use and found that "almost none" had completely abandoned Twitter and Facebook. The same month, "OneZero" reported that Parler users were gathering in Facebook groups to complain that Parler's interface was difficult to operate, to share concerns about having to submit identification to be verified, and to express regrets that their friends and family had not joined.


title: Parler

text: Parler has a significant user base of conservatives. The app also has a number of high-profile Republican users, including Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, as well as Fox News host Sean Hannity. The Anti-Defamation League wrote in November 2020 that "Parler has attracted a range of right-wing extremists" including Proud Boys; proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory; anti-government extremists including members of the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and other militia groups; and white supremacists including members of the alt-right and far-right accelerationists such as the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division. Leaked GPS coordinates from Parler also revealed that users of the site include police officers in the United States and members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Parler was also used by at least 14 UK Conservative Party Members of Parliament; several ministers including cabinet minister Michael Gove and a number of prominent UK conservative commentators joined the app. Some right-wing news companies including "Breitbart News", "The Epoch Times", and "The Daily Caller" also had accounts on Parler.


title: Parler

text: Researchers, journalists, and Parler users have observed the lack of ideological diversity on the service, and that Parler has served as an echo chamber for right-wing extremists and Trump supporters. In mid-2020, alt-right activist and Trump supporter Jack Posobiec compared the service to a Trump rally, saying Parler lacks the "energy" Twitter draws from having communities of people with differing viewpoints. Around the same time, extremism researcher and professor Amarnath Amarasingam said of Parler, "talking to yourself in the dark corners of the internet is actually not that satisfying," and that he was skeptical Parler would excite the far right without left-leaning users with whom they can interact and fight. In June 2020, Matze said he wanted to see more debate on the platform and offered a "progressive bounty" of $10,000 to liberal pundits with at least 50,000 Twitter or Facebook followers who would join; receiving no takers, he later increased this amount to $20,000.


title: Parler

text: Jason Blazakis, the director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, told "The Hill" in November 2020 that he thought extremist users migrating to Parler was a good thing: "these people are leaving those platforms and no longer trying to red pill individuals to see their conspiracy theories on large platforms like Facebook and Twitter." He said Parler's size might result in a smaller audience for those pushing conspiracy theories and spreading misinformation. Angelo Carusone, president of the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America, has said of Parler, "The self-segmenting of this group to Parler will intensify their extremism. No doubt about that. But it will also weaken the influence of the right wing by siphoning off a segment of users, many of whom will be the most engaged users."


title: Parler

text: Parler is one of a number of alternative social network platforms, including Gab and BitChute, that are popular with people banned from mainstream networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram. Deen Freelon and colleagues writing in "Science" characterized Parler as among alt-tech websites and services that are "dedicated to right-wing communities", and listed the service along with 4chan, 8chan, BitChute, and Gab. They noted there are also more ideologically neutral alt-tech services, such as Discord and Telegram. Joe Mulhall of the UK anti-racism group Hope Not Hate has categorized Parler among the "bespoke platforms" for the far-right, which he defines as platforms which were created by people who themselves have "far-right leanings". He distinguishes these from "co-opted platforms" such as DLive and Telegram, which were adopted by the far-right due to minimal moderation but not specifically created for their use.


title: Parler

text: Parler is known for its conservative content. Parler has said they will not fact-check posts on the platform, a decision BBC News in 2020 says has allowed misinformation to spread more easily on the platform than on mainstream social networks. In particular, BBC News noted the presence of posts spreading the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as misinformation surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election, COVID-19, child trafficking, and vaccines. "The Verge" noted in November 2020 that Parler had become a "central hub" for the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory relating to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 and 2020 respectively, "The Forward" and "The Bulwark" observed the presence of antisemitic conspiracy theories as well as others. An analysis of posts from the week leading up to the Capitol storming found that 87% of the links shared on Parler were to misinformation websites, including Islamophobic and QAnon sites. According to Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Parler had become an "echo chamber" for "unfounded conspiratorial allegations of deliberate theft and plotting".


title: Parler

text: Matze told "The Forward" in 2019 that he was unaware of antisemitic content on Parler, but he was unsurprised it was there. He believes removing hateful content only further radicalizes people, saying, "If you're going to fight these peoples' views, they need to be out in the open... Don't force these people into the corners of the internet where they're not going to be able to be proven wrong." Extremism expert Chip Berlet said of Matze's opinions on hateful content: "I think he's full of it... I think he knows exactly what he's creating, he's encouraging people who basically don't like other folks in the country... it's balogna, this is a place for people to fester in their own bigotry." In December 2020, the "Houston Chronicle" argued that "Beneath the thin guise of the app’s self-proclaimed emphasis on 'free speech' lies the ability to say not just a hypothetical 'anything,' but specifically to share racist slurs and violent threats toward political opponents." Political scientist Alison Dagnes has said of Parler's stance on speech on the platform: "I don't think you can have it both ways... There is no such thing as civilized hate speech."


title: Parler

text: In late 2020, Parler revised their site guidelines, which had previously prohibited pornography and obscenity, to permit the posting of "adult sex or nudity". A review by "The Washington Post" in December that year found that pornography was "surging" on Parler, and "threaten[ed] to intrude on users not seeking sexual material". The "Post" observed that pornographic videos began playing without label or warning, and that a filter to label and require an additional click to view explicit content was not being uniformly applied to pornographic images. The report also noted that conspiracy theory content overlapped with pornography, observing that searches for QAnon-related hashtags retrieved "numerous pornographic images".


title: Parler

text: A study co-written by Annalise Baines, Muhammad Ittefaq and Mauryne Abwao published in the journal "Vaccines" found that Parler provided an echo chamber for vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories.


title: Parler

text: Parler describes itself as a free speech platform, and its founders have proclaimed that the service engages in minimal moderation and will not fact-check posts. They have also said they will allow posts that have been removed or flagged as misinformation on other social media networks such as Twitter. Matze said in an interview with CNBC on June 27, 2020, "We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler." The service has been popular among conservatives who allege Twitter and Facebook has been biased against them when moderating content or flagging misinformation, praising Parler for offering an alternative to these mainstream platforms.


title: Parler

text: However, the site has been criticized by users and journalists who believe its content policies are more restrictive than the company portrays, and sometimes more restrictive than those of the mainstream social media platforms to which it claims to be an unbiased free speech alternative. Parler's guidelines disallow content including blackmail, support for terrorism, false rumors, promoting marijuana, and "fighting words" directed towards others. The site initially forbade the posting of pornography, obscenity, or indecency, but later modified its guidelines to allow the posting of "adult sex or nudity". Parler says their moderation policy is based on the positions of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Supreme Court, although "Gizmodo" has described this as "nonsensical", noting that the FCC moderates only public airwaves, not internet content, and that some of Parler's rules are more restrictive than restrictions imposed by either the FCC or the Supreme Court. "The Independent" wrote in November 2020, "Despite positioning itself as a libertarian platform promoting freedom of expression, Parler's community guidelines are more than 1,500 words and include rules that go far beyond legal requirements." "Wired" wrote in November 2020 that Parler enforced its guidelines inconsistently, and that the service either "prioritizes conservative speech rather than free speech" or "is set up to amplify its influencers, rather than create a space for anyone to be heard".


title: Parler

text: In June and July 2020, Parler banned a spate of left-wing accounts, including parody accounts and accounts that were critical of Parler or the prevailing viewpoints on the service. "Mic" wrote that Parler had used the personal information provided during signup to ban those they had identified as "teenage leftists"; Will Duffield of the Cato Institute wrote that Matze had also apparently instituted a blanket ban on antifa supporters. After a surge in popularity among conservatives in November 2020, "The Independent" noted that Parler had again been accused of removing left-leaning users and removing content that contradicted or was critical of popular opinions expressed there. In January 2021, Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci wrote in a report for the Knight First Amendment Institute that Parler's invitation on its front page, "'Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being "deplatformed" for your views,' often isn't borne out in reality as Parler regularly bans trolls who hold opposing viewpoints."


title: Parler

text: On June 30, 2020, after the wave of bans, Matze published a Parler post outlining some of the service's rules. Some of them, such as one asking users not to publish photos of feces, were described by "The Independent" as "bizarre". "Slate" and "Gizmodo" noted that the top reply to Matze's post identified that "Twitter allows four of the five things that Parler censors." Some of the clauses in Parler's user agreement have been criticized as "unusual" and seemingly contradictory to its mission, including one that allows Parler to remove content and ban users "at any time and for any reason or no reason", and one that would require a user to pay for any of Parler's legal expenses incurred as a result of their use of the service. "Ars Technica" reported in November 2020 that the clause requiring users to cover legal fees had been removed from Parler's user agreement following negative media coverage.


title: Parler

text: Matze told "The Washington Post" he does not see Parler's guidelines as contradictory to its stance on free speech. , Parler had a team of 200 volunteer moderators. Matze told "Fortune" magazine the same month that he wanted to expand the moderation team to 1,000 volunteers. In November 2020, "The Wall Street Journal" reported all moderation was still being handled by volunteers, which Parler calls "community jurors". In January 2021, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Parler had increased its moderation team to 600 people, and began paying them. They also had begun hiring full-time employees to moderate the service.


title: Parler

text: In January 2021, Parler executives acknowledged that rules-violating content had remained on the platform, which they attributed to their volunteer team of moderators being overwhelmed by large backlogs of posts to review. Parler executives also reported there had been an increase in calls for violence on the platform leading up to the riots at the Capitol. Parler's chief of policy, Amy Peikoff, told "The Wall Street Journal" she had directed moderators to report such threats to law enforcement, and that she "was concerned that there was actually going to be some sort of violence on the 6th".


title: Parler

text: Parler is a microblogging service that is both a website and an app. After being removed from the Apple App Store in January 2021, a version of the app with added content filters was released in May 2021. The app was formerly available on the Google Play Store, but was also removed in January 2021. Users who register for accounts are able to follow the accounts of other users. Unlike Twitter, the feed of postscalled "parleys"from followed accounts appears to a user chronologically, instead of through an algorithm-based selection process. Parleys are limited to 1,000 characters in length, and users can "vote" or "echo" the posts of other users whom they follow, functions that have been compared to Twitter's "like" and "retweet" functions. A direct messaging feature is also built into the platform, allowing users to privately contact each other. Public figures are verified on the app with a gold badge, and parody accounts are identified with a purple badge. Anyone who verifies their identity by providing government-issued photo identification during signup is identified with a red badge. Spammers have exploited this two-tier verification system by providing documentation to verify their identity, obtaining a red badge, and changing their account name. The red badge persisted after the name change. Parler refers to users of its service as Parleyers.


title: Parler

text: "Forbes" described Parler as "like a barebones Twitter" in June 2020. The same month, "Fast Company" wrote that Parler was "well-designed and organized", also noting its similarity to Twitter. "The Conversation" described the service in July 2020 as "very similar to Twitter in appearance and function, albeit clunkier". CNN has said Parler resembles a "mashup of Twitter and Instagram".


title: Parler

text: Creating an account and using Parler is free. Signup requires both an e-mail address and a phone number. At the point of registration, users have the option of supplying a photo of themselves and a scan of the front and back of their government-issued photo identification to have their account verified by Parler. In order to join Parler's "influencer network", the company may ask for users' social security or tax identification numbers.


title: Parler

text: According to Matze, the identification document scans submitted by users who choose to have their accounts verified are destroyed after verification. However, the requirement for ID scans to become verified has prompted conspiracy theories about Parler's retention and use of user information. Matze has also said the service requires users to provide their phone number because people who can stay anonymous online say "nasty things".


title: Parler

text: Individual users can optionally set their account to view Parleys only from other verified users. According to Matze, the purpose of the verification feature is to allow users to minimize their contact with trolls and bots.


title: Parler

text: In November 2020, security researcher Aubrey Cottle renamed an already-verified Parler account to spoof the identity of Ron Watkins, the former site administrator of 8chan. Speaking to "The Washington Post" after the hoax, Cottle described Parler's security as a "joke". "The Daily Dot" also described "what appeared to be some pretty serious security flaws" in Parler in a report pertaining to the incident. Watkins himself was vocally critical of Parler and its security on Twitter after the spoofing incident, describing the service as "compromised".


title: Parler

text: Also in mid-November, security researcher Kevin Abosch claimed to have discovered weaknesses in Parler's user verification information, alleging 5,000 accounts were compromised in July 2020. Matze calling the alleged hack "fake", adding that the service is protected by "multiple layers of security". As of late November, no evidence that the site used vulnerable WordPress technology as claimed had surfaced.


title: Parler

text: In January 2021, following the storming of the Capitol and just before Parler went offline, a researcher scraped roughly eighty terabytes of public Parler posts. The scraped data included more than a million videos, which maintained GPS metadata identifying the exact locations where the videos were recorded, as well as text and images. Some of the data included posts that users had attempted to delete. The researcher stated her intention was to make a public record of "very incriminating" evidence against those who took part in the storming. The data dump was posted online, and the researcher has said the data will eventually be made available by the Internet Archive. According to "Ars Technica" and "Wired", the reason the researcher was able to scrape the data so easily was due to the Parler website's poor coding quality and security flaws. There was no authentication or rate limiting on the API, and deleted posts were "soft deleted": a flag was added to hide them, but they were not actually deleted. According to "Wired", although all posts downloaded by the researcher were public, because Parler didn't scrub metadata, GPS coordinates of many users' homes had likely been exposed.


title: Parler

text: Parler was founded in 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson. In November 2020, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Rebekah Mercer, an investor known for her support of conservative individuals and organizations, had helped fund Parler. After the report was published, Mercer described herself as having "started Parler" with Matze, and she has been described by CNN as a co-founder of the company.


title: Parler

text: Parler has not disclosed the identities of its owners; however, Dan Bongino publicly announced in June 2020 that he had purchased an "ownership stake" of unspecified value. In November 2020, Matze wrote in a Parler post that Parler was owned by "myself, a small group of close friends and employees", and had as investors Bongino and Parler chief operating officer Jeffrey Wernick In November 2020, a manipulated image circulated on social media of a Fox News chyron that appeared to report that George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and the frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, was a majority owner of Parler. Soros does not own Parler and Fox News never reported the claim; the image had been digitally altered from a photo of a television showing a Fox broadcast about a different subject.


title: Parler

text: On January 29, 2021, Parler's board, controlled by Mercer, terminated Matze from his position as CEO. In a memo Matze sent to "Fox Business", he claimed that "I did not participate in this decision" to terminate him and that he had "met constant resistance to [his] product vision, [his] strong belief in free speech and [his] view of how the Parler site should be managed". In interviews, Matze said his termination may have been related to a dispute within the company regarding the limits of free speech and his belief that the company needed to "crack down" on domestic terrorism and violence. Matze also had all his Parler shares stripped from him when he was fired. With Matze gone, an executive committee of Mercer, British lawyer Matthew Richardson, and former Tea Party activist Mark Meckler runs the company. Parler announced on February 15, 2021, that Mark Meckler would serve as the company's interim CEO while they searched for someone to take the position. Parler announced on May 17, 2021, that they had named George Farmer as CEO. Farmer is a former candidate for and financial supporter of the Brexit Party (now known as Reform UK) in the United Kingdom. Prior to joining Parler, Farmer worked at Red Kite, a hedge fund founded by his father Michael Farmer, Baron Farmer, worked for the veteran metals trader known as "Mr Copper", was a former treasurer of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party, and was the former head of Turning Point UK, a British offshoot of the American conservative nonprofit organization Turning Point USA.


title: Parler

text: On March 2, 2021, NPR reported that Parler's lawyers had written in a legal filing that the company's valuation was "approaching $1billion".


title: Parler

text: On October 12, 2021, Parler announced in an email that they would be moving their headquarters from Henderson, Nevada to Nashville, Tennessee.


title: Parler

text: Seth Dillon, the CEO of conservative Christian news satire website "The Babylon Bee", has been listed as a director of Parler.


title: Parler

text: In a June 27, 2020, interview with CNBC, Matze said he wanted to raise an institutional round of financing soon, although he expressed concerns that venture capitalists might not be interested in funding the company because of ideological differences. "Fortune" wrote in June 2020 that the company planned to add advertising to the service soon. They also planned to generate revenue based on an ad matching scheme whereby companies would be matched with Parler influencers to post sponsored content, with Parler taking a percentage of each deal. "Slate" has questioned Parler's business model, writing that Parler's plan to rely on advertising revenue "seems far from foolproof" given the 2020 advertising boycotts of Facebook by some large brands who objected to hateful content on the platform. NBC also questioned whether corporations would be interested in advertising alongside "controversial material" on Parler. Matze said in an interview on June 29, 2020, that the business was not profitable. , Parler had not received any known venture capital, although in February 2021, "Buzzfeed News" reported that Parler had recently sought to obtain funding from J. D. Vance's venture-capital firm Narya Capital. In January 2022, Parler raised $20 million in funding.


title: Parler

text: In September 2022, Parler announced $16M in Series B funding, for a total of $56M in funding to date.


title: Eric Yuan

text: Eric S. Yuan (; born 20 February 1970) is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman, engineer, and the chief executive officer and founder of Zoom Video Communications, of which he owns 22%.


title: Eric Yuan

text: Yuan is the son of geology engineers. He was born and raised in Tai'an, Shandong Province, China. In 4th grade, Yuan collected construction scraps to recycle copper for cash.


title: Eric Yuan

text: As a first-year university student in 1987, he was inspired to develop videotelephony software while he took 10-hour train rides to visit his girlfriend and was looking for an easier way to "visit" her. He earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics with a minor in computer application from Shandong University of Science and Technology, and a master's degree in geology engineering from China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing. Yuan completed a Stanford University executive program in 2006.


title: Eric Yuan

text: After earning his master's degree, Yuan lived in Beijing, and attended a training program in Japan for four months. Inspired by Bill Gates, who spoke in Japan in 1995, he moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 to join the tech boom. At the time, Yuan spoke very little English, and applied nine times before being granted a visa to the United States.


title: Eric Yuan

text: Upon arriving in the US, Yuan joined WebEx, a web conferencing startup, where he was one of the first 20 hires. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007, at which time he became vice president of engineering. In 2011, Yuan pitched a new smartphone-friendly video conferencing system to Cisco management. When the idea was rejected, Yuan left Cisco to establish his own company, Zoom Video Communications.


title: Eric Yuan

text: In 2019, Zoom became a public company via an initial public offering, at which time Yuan became a billionaire. His wealth has increased during COVID-19 pandemic, as Zoom has benefited from the shift to online work and teaching. On September 1, 2020, Yuan's net worth was estimated to be US$16.4 billion, a figure 360% higher than his net worth at the beginning of the year. In March 2021, Yuan transferred $6 billion worth of Zoom shares to a grantor retained annuity trust, for which Yuan is a trustee.


title: Eric Yuan

text: Yuan married his girlfriend Sherry at the age of 22, while he was a master's student at China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing. They have three children. Yuan and his family live in Santa Clara, California. In 2007, Yuan became a naturalized United States citizen.


title: Eric Yuan

text: Yuan was named the 2020 "Time" Businessperson of the Year, and was included in the "Time" 100 Most Influential People of 2020.


title: Renfield (film)

text: Renfield is an upcoming American horror-comedy film directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley, based on an original pitch by Robert Kirkman. The film stars Nicholas Hoult as Renfield, a henchman to Count Dracula who decides to leave his line of work after falling in love. Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, and Nicolas Cage co-star. The film is scheduled to be released on April 14, 2023, by Universal Pictures.


title: Renfield (film)

text: Count Dracula's lackey Renfield finds a new lease on life in modern day New Orleans when he falls in love with Rebecca Quincy, a feisty but perennially aggressive traffic cop.


title: Renfield (film)

text: In July 2014, Universal Pictures announced its plan to reboot the "Classic Monsters" franchise and its properties, including the character of Count Dracula, as part of a shared universe known as the "Dark Universe", with Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan attached to oversee its development. After the negative reception of "Dracula Untold" (2014), its connections to the shared universe were downplayed, and "The Mummy" (2017) was re-positioned as the first film in the series. "The Mummy", a critical and commercial failure, resulted in Universal's decision to shift its focus on individual storytelling and move away from the shared universe concept.


title: Renfield (film)

text: "Renfield" is based on an original pitch by Robert Kirkman and uses a screenplay by Ryan Ridley. In November 2019, Dexter Fletcher was hired to direct the film for Universal and Skybound Entertainment. The film was described as a comedic approach to the story of Count Dracula in the vein of Taika Waititi's vampire mockumentary "What We Do in the Shadows" that focused on the character of Renfield. In 2020, Leigh Whannell's "The Invisible Man" became a commercial and critical success for Universal and served as a relaunch to its monster universe. In April 2021, Chris McKay entered negotiations to direct after Fletcher left to work on a reboot of "The Saint" for Paramount Pictures. McKay was hired because he reportedly gave a successful pitch combining the story's mix of humor and action, "something the studio was looking to have more of".


title: Renfield (film)

text: Nicholas Hoult was cast as Renfield in August 2021. Nicolas Cage was cast to play Count Dracula in November, Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz were added to the cast in December, and Adrian Martinez, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Bess Rous, James Moses Black, Caroline Williams, and Brandon Scott Jones were confirmed to star the following year. An "enormous" fan of Dracula and the source material, Cage prepared for his role by observing the distinctive ways Dracula was portrayed on screen by Bela Lugosi, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman. "What can I bring that will be different?", he said, "I want it to pop in a unique way. We've seen it played well, we've seen it play not so well, so what can we do? So I'm thinking to really focus on the movement of the character ... [and] that perfect tone of comedy and horror". Cage mentioned "An American Werewolf in London" (1981), "Ringu" (1998), and "Malignant" (2021) as inspirations for the role. The film will mark Cage's first live-action film by a major studio since "" (2011).


title: Renfield (film)

text: Filming began in New Orleans on February 3, 2022, with Mitchell Amundsen serving as cinematographer. On February 8, more than twenty vehicles belonging to the production crew were burglarized. One security guard was present at the time of the incident, which occurred late at night in a secured parking lot. Crew member Elmo Peoples said the vandals had stolen his insurance papers, two bank cards, and a laptop. He added, "I'm supposed to be here all week and I don't even want to come back because I feel like they don't really care about us as much as the main characters or actors." Love Bugs Film LLC reassured the production crew that they would hire additional security. Filming wrapped on April 14, 2022, exactly one year prior to the film's scheduled release.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Steven John Wilson (born 3 November 1967) is an English musician. He is the founder, guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Porcupine Tree, as well as being a member of several other bands, including Blackfield, Storm Corrosion and No-Man. He is also a solo artist, having released 6 solo albums since his solo debut "Insurgentes" in 2008. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Wilson has made music prolifically and earned critical acclaim. His honours include six nominations for Grammy Awards: twice with Porcupine Tree, once with his collaborative band Storm Corrosion and three times as a solo artist. In 2017 "The Daily Telegraph" described him as "a resolutely independent artist" and "probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of".


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson is a self-taught composer, producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player, and plays other instruments as needed, including bass guitar, autoharp, hammered dulcimer and flute. His influences and work have encompassed a diverse range of genres including pop, psychedelia, progressive rock and electronic, among others, shifting his musical direction through his albums. His concerts incorporate quadraphonic sound and elaborate visuals. He has worked with artists such as Elton John, Guns N' Roses, XTC, Opeth, Pendulum, Yes, Fish, Marillion, Black Sabbath, and Anathema. He has remixed several classic pop and rock records, such as Tears for Fears' "Songs from the Big Chair" and "The Seeds of Love", Ultravox's "Vienna", Jethro Tull's "Aqualung", King Crimson's "In the Court of the Crimson King", and Roxy Music's self-titled debut album.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson released his sixth solo album, "The Future Bites", on 29 January 2021. A limited edition of a single copy of the album sold on pre-order immediately for £10,000 on Black Friday in November 2020, with all proceeds going to Music Venue Trust to help save UK music venues affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Future Bites 30-track Digital Deluxe version was made available on 27 August 2021, including remixed versions by artists such as Biffy Clyro, Nile Rodgers and Pure Reason Revolution.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Born in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age six in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, where he discovered his interest in music around the age of eight. According to Wilson, his life was changed one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" and Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby", respectively. It was Wilson's affinity for these albums that helped craft his guitar and songwriting abilities.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Both LPs influenced his future song writing. He says "in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since". His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man (Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness), although the band would later develop a more meditative and experimental Talk Talk-esque approach.


title: Steven Wilson

text: As a child, Wilson was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. However, when he was eleven, he found a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; in his own words, "scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines". A year later, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could begin experimenting with the possibilities of studio recording.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson says his taste in music diverged from his peers in the 1980s:I grew up in the 80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. There were some interesting things developing, but everyone I knew wanted to be in Level 42, Simple Minds or U2. I wasn't interested in any of that, so I found solace in the 60s and 70s music that my parents were listening to. And I began to discover this wonderful era, what you'd call the great album era, from 1967 to 1977, from "Sgt Pepper" through to punk.


title: Steven Wilson

text: One of Wilson's earliest musical projects was the psychedelic duo Altamont (featuring a 15-year-old Wilson working with synth/electronics player Simon Vockings). Their one and only cassette album, "Prayer for the Soul", featured lyrics by English psychedelic scenester Alan Duffy, whose work Wilson would later use on first two Porcupine Tree albums. Around the same time that Wilson was part of Altamont, he was also in a progressive rock band called Karma, which played live around Hertfordshire and recorded two cassette albums, "The Joke's on You" (1983) and "The Last Man To Laugh" (1985). These contained early versions of "Small Fish", "Nine Cats" and "The Joke's on You", which were subsequently resurrected as Porcupine Tree songs.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson went on to join the New Wave/AOR band Pride of Passion as keyboard player, replacing former Marillion keyboard player Brian Jelliman (another former Marillion member, Diz Minnitt, also played in the band). Pride of Passion would later change their name to Blazing Apostles and alter their lineup and approach, finally coming to an end in 1987.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments had contained avant-garde and industrial recordings, psychedelia and progressive rock. He was, however, also becoming more interested in songwriting and pop music, something that would manifest itself in his next developments.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 1986, Wilson launched the two projects that would make his name. The first of these was initially called "No Man Is An Island (Except The Isle of Man)", although it would later be renamed "No-Man." This began life as a solo Wilson instrumental project blending progressive rock with synth pop, subsequently moving towards art-pop when singer/lyricist Tim Bowness joined the project the following year. The second project was "Porcupine Tree", which was originally intended to be a full-on pastiche of psychedelic rock (inspired by the similar Dukes of Stratosphear project by XTC) carried out for the mutual entertainment of Wilson and his childhood friend Malcolm Stocks.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Over the next three years, the projects would evolve in parallel. Of his two efforts, No Man Is An Island (Except The Isle of Man) was the first to release a commercial single (1989's "The Girl From Missouri", on Plastic Head Records), while Porcupine Tree built an increasing underground reputation via the release of a series of cassette-only releases via The Freak Emporium (the mail-order wing of British psychedelic label Delerium Records).


title: Steven Wilson

text: By 1990, No Man Is An Island (Except The Isle of Man) had fully evolved into No-Man and was a voice/violin/multi-instrument trio which had incorporated dance beats into its art-pop sound. The second No-Man single – a crooned cover of the Donovan song "Colours" arranged in a dub-loop style anticipating trip hop - won the Single of the Week award in "Melody Maker" and gained the band a recording contract with the high-profile independent label One Little Indian (at the time, famous for The Shamen and Björk). Their debut One Little Indian single, "Days in the Trees", won the same Single of the Week award the following year. The single also briefly charted and, although sales were not outstanding, Wilson had now gained credibility in the record industry (as well as enough finance to fit out his home studio with the equipment he would need to advance his music).


title: Steven Wilson

text: By this time, Wilson had also released the official Porcupine Tree debut album, "On the Sunday of Life..." (which compiled the best material from the underground tapes). No-Man's debut full-length release – a compilation of EP tracks called "Lovesighs – An Entertainment" – followed in 1992, as did Porcupine Tree's infamous LSD-themed maxi-single "Voyage 34" which made the "NME" indie chart for six weeks. No-Man also toured England with a six-piece band including three ex-members of the art-pop band Japan – Mick Karn, Steve Jansen and (most significantly) keyboardist Richard Barbieri. 1993 saw Wilson consolidating his initial success with albums from both Porcupine Tree ("Up the Downstair") and No-Man ("Loveblows And Lovecries – A Confession").


title: Steven Wilson

text: Porcupine Tree, meanwhile, toured frequently and passed through various overt phases of different musical stylings (including psychedelia, progressive rock, modern guitar rock and heavy metal) while retaining the core of Wilson's sonic imagination and songwriting. By the mid-2000s Porcupine Tree had become a well known rock band with albums on major labels such as Atlantic and Roadrunner. Also by this time, Wilson had become in-demand as a producer and was being cited as an influence by various up-and-coming musicians.


title: Steven Wilson

text: During the late 1990s, Wilson's love of experimental, drone and ambient music led to a series of new projects, notably Bass Communion and Incredible Expanding Mindfuck (also known as IEM). He also began to release a series of CD singles under his own name.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Having established himself as a producer, Wilson was invited to produce other artists, notably the Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek and Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth. Though he claims to enjoy production more than anything else, with the demands of his own projects, he has mostly restricted himself to mixing for other artists in the last few years.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson has written reviews for the Mexican edition of the "Rolling Stone" magazine. They are all translated into Spanish. Two reviews have been published so far: one for Radiohead's "In Rainbows" and another for Murcof's 2007 work, "Cosmos". He also has contributed to UK magazine "Classic Rock" as an occasional reviewer and to US magazine "Electronic Musician". Wilson wrote the foreword for 2010 book "Mean Deviation".


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson produced and contributed backing vocals, guitar and keyboards for Opeth on the albums "Blackwater Park", "Deliverance", and "Damnation", also contributing lyrics for one song ("Death Whispered a Lullaby") in "Damnation". In addition to this, he has collaborated on many projects with Belgian experimental musician Dirk Serries of Vidna Obmana and Fear Falls Burning, most notably on their collaboration project Continuum which has so far produced two albums. Wilson is also featured on a Fovea Hex EP "Allure" (Part3 of the "Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent" trilogy of EP's) on bass guitar. This EP was released in April 2007 through Die-Stadt Musik.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson has also worked with a range of other artists, including OSI, JBK, Orphaned Land, Paatos, Theo Travis, Yoko Ono, Fish, Cipher and Anja Garbarek, by performing songwriting duties as well as performing musically. Wilson is featured on the Pendulum album "Immersion", with his vocals featuring on "The Fountain". He made a guest appearance on Dream Theater's 2007 album, "Systematic Chaos" on the song "Repentance", as one of several musical guests recorded apologizing to important people in their lives for wrongdoings in the past.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson did an interview with German musician and composer Klaus Schulze. Schulze was an important figure of the Krautrock movement. This interview is featured as bonus material in Schulze's Live DVD, "Rheingold".


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson has become known for his 5.1 surround sound mixes, with the 2007 Porcupine Tree album "Fear of a Blank Planet" nominated for a Grammy Award in the "Best Mix For Surround Sound" category. It was also voted #3 album of the year by "Sound And Vision". Wilson has worked on several other surround sound projects, which have included remixing the Jethro Tull and King Crimson back catalogues, as well as Marillion's 1985 album "Misplaced Childhood". The Anathema album "We're Here Because We're Here" was mixed by Wilson and he is thanked in the album liner notes, and he mixed two songs on their subsequent album "Distant Satellites". He also did the remix for "In the Land of Grey and Pink" by Canterbury scene band Caravan. The first three new editions were issued in October 2009, with more emerging in batches over the coming years. Wilson is responsible for the 5.1 and new stereo mixes of the 1992 XTC album "Nonsuch" in 2013, as well as the Gentle Giant albums "The Power and the Glory" and "Octopus" in 2014 and 2015, respectively. In 2018, he released "Yes: The Steven Wilson Remixes" consisting of Yes albums "The Yes Album" (1971), "Fragile" (1971), "Close to the Edge" (1972), the double album "Tales From Topographic Oceans" (1973), and "Relayer" (1974).


title: Steven Wilson

text: During 2003–2010 Wilson released a series of six two-track CD singles under his own name, each one featuring a cover version and an original Steven Wilson song (or in one case a Wilson arrangement of a traditional song). It featured songs by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, Swedish pop group ABBA, UK rock band The Cure, Scottish songwriter Momus, Prince, and Scottish singer/songwriter Donovan.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Separate from the "Cover Versions" series, Wilson has also contributed a cover version of the Cardiacs song "Stoneage Dinosaurs". The song was featured on "", which is a fundraising compilation album released in December 2010 to benefit the hospitalised Cardiacs leader Tim Smith, whom Wilson has cited as a major inspiration spiritually, if not necessarily in style.


title: Steven Wilson

text: The complete collection of the cover version songs was released as an album titled 'Cover Version' in 2014.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In November 2008 Wilson released his first official solo album, "Insurgentes", recorded between January–August 2008. The album was first released as two limited edition versions, both with hardback book featuring the images of longtime collaborator Danish photographer Lasse Hoile. A standard retail version was released on 9March 2009.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Lasse Hoile's full-length feature version of the film based on the recording of the album was premiered at the international film festival in Copenhagen in November 2009. The film was also screened at film festivals in Canada, Germany, Mexico, Sweden and United States. The film is described as part documentary, part surreal road movie. Hoile also directed a video for the song "Harmony Korine" from the album. The video was a homage to European art house films, and has been nominated for "Best Cinematography Award" and "Best Music Video Award" at Camerimage.


title: Steven Wilson

text: A remix mini album was released in June 2009, featuring remixes of material from "Insurgentes" by David A. Sitek, Dälek, Engineers, Pat Mastelotto and Fear Falls Burning.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson's second solo album, "Grace for Drowning", was released in September 2011 in CD, vinyl and Blu-ray formats. It is a double album, with the individual parts named "Deform to Form a Star" and "Like Dust I Have Cleared from My Eye". Wilson also announced his first solo tour in Europe and North America to promote his solo albums. The tour took place in October and November 2011 and contained songs from both "Insurgentes" and "Grace for Drowning". A live video performance recorded in Mexico titled "Get All You Deserve" was released on 25 September 2012.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 16 December 2011, Wilson announced new European tour dates for the second leg of his "Grace for Drowning" tour, running in April and May 2012. South American dates were later added and announced on 21 February 2012. He also won the "Guiding Light" title at the Progressive Music Awards in 2012.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson's third solo studio album, recorded with most of the members of the touring band for "Grace for Drowning" was released on 25 February 2013. Alan Parsons engineered the sessions in Los Angeles. The album reached the top 30 in the UK, and number3 in the German album charts. In October 2012, Wilson announced the first leg of the supporting tour, consisting of 18 shows across Europe and 17 shows across North America between March–May 2013. For these shows, Chad Wackerman (best known for his work with Frank Zappa) replaced Marco Minnemann on drums due to conflicting schedules. The second leg of the tour from October–November 2013 covered Australia and Europe, and included a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The song "The Raven That Refused to Sing" was featured in the trailer for the 2014 film Pompeii. The album finished top of several critics and readers polls, including UK "Prog" magazine and German magazine "Eclipsed". The album was voted album of the year at the 2013 Progressive Music Awards. On 13 July 2015 The Prog Report ranked the album as #2 on their top prog albums of the last 25 years.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson's fourth solo album, "Hand. Cannot. Erase.", was released on 27 February 2015. It was inspired by a documentary about Joyce Carol Vincent, a young British woman who lay dead in her apartment for nearly three years before being discovered. "Hand. Cannot. Erase." received critical acclaim from music critics. "The Guardian" rated the album five stars and called it "a smart, soulful and immersive work of art". "Eclipsed" magazine described the album as "one more shining jewel in the discography of Steven Wilson" and "Metal Hammer" awarded "Hand. Cannot. Erase." 6/7 and described it as "another masterpiece". US website FDRMX rated the album 4.8/5 and stated ""Hand. Cannot. Erase." grabs your full attention from the beginning to the very final note, and that's the sign of a great album". The supporting tour spanned from March to June 2015 and consisted of 31 shows in Europe and a total of 34 shows in North and South America. In September, two special shows took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Due to The Aristocrats tour, for the American shows Guthrie Govan and Marco Minnemann were replaced by Dave Kilminster and Craig Blundell, respectively.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 12 December 2016, Wilson began recording his fifth solo studio album with engineer Paul Stacey in London. With the departure of most of the members of his solo band from the prior two albums, Wilson handled most of the guitar on the album, with Craig Blundell and Jeremy Stacey both contributing drums. Ninet Tayeb was featured on additional vocals and had a bigger role than she did on "Hand. Cannot. Erase." Andy Partridge of XTC revealed that he co-wrote two songs for the album. On 5January 2017, Wilson posted a teaser clip of himself and Ninet Tayeb recording a new song titled "Pariah". In April 2017, Wilson announced that he had switched record labels for the release, with the album to be released on Caroline International. Wilson also mentioned that harmonica player Mark Feltham is going to be playing on the next record and released a clip of him contributing to a song titled "To the Bone". Slovak musician David Kollar featured on three songs of the new record.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 9 May 2017, the album was officially unveiled as "To the Bone" and released on 18 August 2017. Wilson embarked on major tours of the UK, Europe and North America in 2018 and 2019 to promote the album. For the tour, Alex Hutchings was introduced to replace Dave Kilminster as the guitarist of the live band.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 12 September 2018, a live album was announced via his official Instagram account under the name "", and it was released on 2November 2018.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 26 May 2019, Wilson confirmed on his Instagram account that the writing and recording process on his sixth studio album was underway. It was expected to be released in 2020. The album was produced by David Kosten, who is also known as Faultline, making the upcoming album Wilson's second to not be produced by him alone. On 21 October 2019, Wilson announced 'The Future Bites Tour', his largest and most ambitious show to date. The Future Bites Tour was planned to be performed in large arenas in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Poland in September 2020. On 24 December 2019, Wilson announced that his as yet untitled sixth studio album was close to completion and promised further news in early 2020.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 5 March 2020, Wilson began a teaser campaign across his online channels, centering on modern themes of consumerism, product branding and manipulative social media. A few days later, artwork for "Personal Shopper" was unveiled with a release date of 12 March 2020 at 9am GMT. On 12 March 2020, Wilson announced that his sixth solo album "The Future Bites" would be released on 12 June 2020. The first single to be taken from the album, "Personal Shopper" (featuring a spoken word appearance by Elton John), was released the same day.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 22 April 2020, Wilson announced that the release date of "The Future Bites" would be pushed back to 29 January 2021, due to logistical/creative challenges facing the music industry amid the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In May 2020, Wilson launched 'The Album Years', an audio only podcast with his partner in No-Man, Tim Bowness. It was very successful upon release, charting highly all around the world on Apple Podcasts.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 22 September 2020, Wilson relaunched "The Future Bites" with a revised album tracklist and the release of a new single, "Eminent Sleaze", along with the release of a video produced by Crystal Spotlight. On 29 October 2020, Wilson released a video for "King Ghost", the third single to be taken from "The Future Bites". This was directed by Wilson's longtime video collaborator Jess Cope.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 24 November 2020, Wilson released "12 Things I Forgot", the fourth single from "The Future Bites". The release of "12 Things I Forgot" was accompanied with an announcement that a completely unique, one of one limited edition of "The Future Bites" would be sold on 27 November 2020 for £10,000, with all proceeds going to Music Venue Trust to help save UK music venues affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This edition of the album sold immediately after going on sale.


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 22 March 2021, Wilson announced that due to uncertainty surrounding live performances amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, The Future Bites Tour (scheduled to begin in September 2021) would be cancelled. Wilson stated that he will now concentrate on upcoming music projects, including his seventh studio album, a conceptual work entitled "The Harmony Codex" that is planned for release in mid-2023. Wilson also revealed an autobiography, "Limited Edition of One", which was published by Little, Brown and Company on 7 April 2022.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Porcupine Tree started out as a duo of Wilson and his school friend Malcolm Stocks (with Wilson providing the majority of the instrumentation and Stocks contributing mostly ideas, additional vocals and experimental guitar sounds). Wilson began experimenting by recording music in his home until he had the hunch it could become someway marketable. The material was subsequently compiled into three demo tapes ("Tarquin's Seaweed Farm", "Love, Death & Mussolini" and "The Nostalgia Factory"). For the first tape, he even wrote an inlay introduction to an obscure (imaginary) band called "The Porcupine Tree", suggesting the band met in the early '70s at a rock festival, and they had been in and out of prison many times. The booklet also contained information about band's obscure members like Sir Tarquin Underspoon and Timothy Tadpole-Jones, and crew members like Linton Samuel Dawson (if put into initials forming LSD). Wilson: "It was a bit of fun. But of course like anything that starts as a joke, people started to take it all seriously!". When Wilson signed to Delerium label, he selected what he considered the best tracks from these early tapes. All those songs were mastered and made up Porcupine Tree's first official studio album, "On the Sunday of Life...".


title: Steven Wilson

text: Quickly after, Wilson would release the single "Voyage 34", a thirty-minute long piece that could be described as a mixture of ambient, trance and psychedelia. This was done partly as an attempt to produce the longest single yet released, which it was until it was later exceeded by The Orb's "Blue Room." With non-existent radio play "Voyage 34" still managed to enter the "NME" indie chart for six weeks and became an underground chill-out classic.


title: Steven Wilson

text: The second full-length album, "Up the Downstair" (though Wilson considers it the first 'proper' PT album since it was made as such and not simply compiled), was released in 1993 and had a very good reception, praised by "Melody Maker" as "a psychedelic masterpiece... one of the albums of the year". This was the first album to include ex-Japan member, keyboardist Richard Barbieri and Australian-born bassist Colin Edwin. About the end of the year, Porcupine Tree became a full band for the first time with the inclusion of Chris Maitland on drums.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson continued exploring the ambient and trance grounds and issued "The Sky Moves Sideways". It also entered the "NME", "Melody Maker", and "Music Week" charts and many fans started hailing them as the Pink Floyd of the nineties, something Wilson would reject: "I can't help that. It's true that during the period of 'The Sky Moves Sideways', I had done a little too much of it in the sense of satisfying, in a way, the fans of Pink Floyd who were listening to us because that group doesn't make albums anymore. Moreover, I regret it".


title: Steven Wilson

text: The band's fourth work, "Signify", included the first full-band compositions and performance, which resulted in less use of drum machines and a more full-band sound. It can be considered a departure from its predecessors for a more song-oriented style. After the release of the live album "Coma Divine" concluded their deal with Delerium in 1997, the band moved to Snapper and issued two poppier albums, "Stupid Dream" in 1999 and "Lightbulb Sun" in 2000.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Two years would pass until their seventh studio album, and in the meantime the band switched labels again, this time signing to the major label Lava. Drummer Chris Maitland was also replaced by Gavin Harrison. "In Absentia" was released in 2002, featuring a heavier sound than all the group's previous works. It charted in many European countries and remains one of the top-selling Porcupine Tree albums to date. The 2004 special edition was also their first record to be released in 5.1 Surround Sound, winning the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" award from the Surround Music Awards 2004 shortly afterwards.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 2005, Porcupine Tree released "Deadwing", a record inspired by a film script written by Steven Wilson and his friend Mike Bennion. This became the first Porcupine Tree album to chart on the "Billboard" 200, entering at #132. The album won "Classic Rock" magazine's "album of the year" award and its surround version received the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" once again.


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson started writing Porcupine Tree's next album in early 2006 in Tel Aviv, Israel, alongside work on the second album for his side-project Blackfield. Writing sessions finished in London, UK, in June 2006. In August of the same year the band released their first live DVD, titled "Arriving Somewhere...", and started a tour between September and November to promote it; the first half of each show was made up of all-new material. When the tour concluded the band went into the studio and finished recording and mastering the album. In early January 2007, the band revealed the album title was going to be "Fear of a Blank Planet" (a deliberate reference to Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet") and the concept was influenced by the Bret Easton Ellis novel Lunar Park. The album hit the shops on 16 April 2007 in Europe and 24 April in USA. The lyrics revolve around common 21st Century issues such as technology alienation, teen violence, prescription drugs, attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder.


title: Steven Wilson

text: "Fear of a Blank Planet" resulted in the most successful album to date in terms of market and sales, and also received the most favourable reviews of the band's whole career. It entered the Billboard 200 at #59, and charted in almost all European countries, peaking at #31 in the UK. It was nominated for a US Grammy, and won several polls as the best album of the year (e.g. "Classic Rock" magazine, Aardshock, The Netherlands). In July 2007 the "Nil Recurring" EP was released, containing material that had been left off the album.


title: Steven Wilson

text: At a European show in August 2008, Wilson said Porcupine Tree was beginning work on material for their next album with an eye toward a release in 2009. This album was later revealed to be titled "The Incident". "The Incident" is a double CD set containing "The Incident", a 55-minute "song cycle", on the first disc and four shorter songs on the second. It has received significant attention and media coverage and the band achieved their highest chart positions to date, reaching 5in The Netherlands, 9in Germany, 23 in the UK and 25 on the Billboard 200 in the USA. The subsequent tour of the US and Europe highlighted a large increase in the band's following, with many shows sold out. The single from "The Incident", "Time Flies" was available as a free download from iTunes for one week in October 2009.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 2010 after this tour, the band became inactive as Wilson committed himself to his solo work and other members began working on their own separate projects. The band reformed in 2021 after a 12 year hiatus. The band is now made up of a trio line-up of Wilson, Barbieri and Harrison. The band's former bassist, Colin Edwin, did not return. The reformation was formally revealed on 1 November 2021, with the simultaneous release of the "Harridan" single and the announcement of a new studio album, "Closure/Continuation", released on 24 June 2022.


title: Steven Wilson

text: No-Man is Wilson's long-term collaboration with singer and songwriter Tim Bowness. Influenced by everything from ambient music to hip-hop, their early singles and albums were a mixture of dance beats and lush orchestrations. However, after a few years the duo started to create more textural and experimental music. Beginning with "Flowermouth" in 1994, they have worked with a very wide palette of sounds, and many guest musicians, blending balladry with both acoustic and electronic sounds. No-Man was the first Wilson project to achieve any degree of success, signing with UK independent label One Little Indian (the label of Björk, the Shamen and Skunk Anansie among others).


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 22 November 2019, the band released their seventh album "Love You to Bits", their first original recording in 11 years.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 1996 came the first in a series of albums by I.E.M. (The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, a name which had also been considered for Porcupine Tree in its infancy), dedicated to exploring Wilson's love of krautrock and experimental rock music. Initially Wilson had planned for the project to be anonymous, but then label Delerium Records published a song on their Pick N Mix compilation with the composition credited to "Steven Wilson" and so attempts to pass off the project in this way were abandoned. The project released two more albums "Arcadia Son", and "IEM Have Come For Your Children", in 2001. A box set of four CDs, consisting of everything Wilson recorded under the name - billed as "an homage and a final farewell to I.E.M." - was released in June 2010.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 1998 Wilson launched Bass Communion, a project dedicated to recordings in an industrial, ambient, drone, and/or electronic vein. So far there have been several full length Bass Communion CDs, vinyl LPs, and singles, many of them issued in handmade or limited editions.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In 2001 Wilson met and began to collaborate with Israeli rock musician Aviv Geffen, with whom he created the band Blackfield. Since then the duo have released three acclaimed albums of what they refer to as "melodic and melancholic rock." The albums spawned several singles, notably "Blackfield," "Pain" and "Once." A live DVD from a show in New York was released in 2007. A third album titled "Welcome to my DNA" came in March 2011. Later that year Wilson decided to take a secondary role in the band, feeling that with so much of his time and attention devoted to his solo career, there was not enough left for him to properly fill the role of co-leader of Blackfield as well. He still contributed to the band's fourth album in 2013 as singer and producer. Wilson left the band after a short European tour in February 2014 and a final date in New York City on 1May 2014, due to his increasingly tight schedule with his solo career and upcoming projects. However, in June 2015 and June 2016, Wilson was seen in recording sessions with Geffen and Alan Parsons. In August 2016, Blackfield announced that their new album, "Blackfield V", would mark the return of Wilson to the band in "full partnership".


title: Steven Wilson

text: On 13 May 2019 Aviv Geffen uploaded a picture to his official Instagram account, revealing that both musicians are currently working on their sixth record.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In March 2010 Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt, the front man of Opeth, decided to work on a new project as a collaboration under the name of "Storm Corrosion". The self-titled album was released in May 2012 on "Roadrunner Records". It has been described as being "the final part in the odd trilogy of records completed by (Opeth's) "Heritage" and Steven Wilson's second solo album "Grace for Drowning"." Åkerfeldt and Wilson did no shows in support of the album, and while the two have expressed interest in working together again, they are not currently writing another album for "Storm Corrosion".


title: Steven Wilson

text: For live shows, Wilson plays barefoot. His habit goes back to his early childhood, where he has said, "I always had a problem wearing shoes and I've always gone around with bare feet". He has said that another factor in performing barefoot is the advantage it gives in operating his diverse guitar pedals. He has injured his feet as a result: in one of his early shows, he ended up with a syringe inserted in his foot and had to get a tetanus vaccine. He has said "I've stepped on nails, screws, drawing pins, stubbed my toe, I've come off stage with blood just coming out... I mean, I've had it all mate, but to be honest, nothing's going to stop me." He later started using a carpet, which reduced the frequency of such incidents.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In addition to his legacy with Porcupine Tree, some artists have cited Wilson directly as an influence, including Steffen Kummerer of Obscura, Caligula's Horse, Tor Oddmund Suhrke of Leprous, Jonathan Carpenter of The Contortionist, Bilocate, and Alex Vynogradoff of Kauan.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In addition, other artists have been quoted expressing admiration for his solo work, including Alex Lifeson, Steve Howe, Robert Trujillo, Adrian Belew, Jordan Rudess, Mike Portnoy, Rob Swire, Seven Lions, Demians (Nicolas Chapel), Jem Godfrey, Jim Matheos, Dan Briggs, Eraldo Bernocchi, and Chantel McGregor.


title: Steven Wilson

text: In June 2022 in an interview with Qobuz alongside Richard Barbieri, he mentioned that Zeit by the German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream was his favorite album of all time, calling it the "birth of ambient music."


title: Steven Wilson

text: Wilson prefers to keep a low profile, following the example of musicians like Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Tool.