Three progressive rock visionaries gather with us in baking hot Barcelona to muse over recorder lessons, slap bass bans and taming shredders...

The Be Prog! My Friend festival is a hard proposition to argue with. Set in the hazy sunlit square of Barcelona's historic and quite stunning Poble Espanyol, it certainly beats the sodden mud of the British festival season. And the opportunity it offers to grab a cool mojito and see three of progressive rock's modern kingpins on the same bill is irresistible.

I learned so much from mixing these albums made at a time when recording was basically, get a bunch of guys in a room - Steven Wilson

It was also our chance to coax Steven Wilson, Opeth's Mikael Akerfeldt and The Pineapple Thief's Bruce Soord towards our table for their first ever interview together...

You were all involved with the recent remixes of Opeth's Damnation and Deliverance albums for their reissue - does dissecting other artists' classic albums give you an extra insight as a musician?

Steven: "For me it's an education. I've done albums going back to the late 60s and it's an education to deconstruct and reconstruct music like that. And also that music was made in a completely different era, a completely different recording philosophy.

"I learned so much from mixing these albums made at a time when recording was basically, get a bunch of guys in a room, play together. Minimal overdubs - there's your album. And that blew my mind in a way because, like these guys, I'd grown up with computer recording where you're unlimited in the amount of tracks you can do. And you kind of get an okay guitar sound but you track it 12 times and it sounds massive.

"These guys couldn't do that. They had to get one massive guitar tone because they couldn't afford to double track it, because they didn't have enough tracks. And that's just a completely different way of thinking. And so for me it was really an education to mix those old records."

Bruce: "Those early Yes ones, like Fragile - you did Fragile didn't you, Steve?"

Steven: "Yes I did."

Bruce: "How many tracks were they using then?"

Steven: "16. They were being very economic."

Bruce: "So did they bounce down stuff?"

Steven: "They did bounce down, but still most of what you're hearing when you hear that record is what they played live in the studio. And I'd say 25 per cent at most is tracked [overdubbed]."

Bruce: "Because when I was [remixing] Deliverance, that was an early Pro Tools session... but even that wasn't many tracks actually."

Mikael: "I can't remember. I didn't even know who had the tapes..."

Steven: "You didn't even know what was going on when you were making that record. I remember you were like in another place because your grandmother had passed away... you were fucked up..."

Mikael: "And I can't remember much. Andy Sneap did the original mix so once they started talking about this thing that [Bruce] mixed it was, where is the album? Whose got it? Who's got the files?"

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