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Storm Corrosion is the long-discussed and highly anticipated collaboration between Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth and Porcupine Tree's Steven Wilson. 

A spiritual successor to both Heritage and Grace For Drowning, Storm Corrosion takes an idiosyncratic musical path that operates in Wyrd Folk and ambitious singer-songwriter territories 

The duo's debut surprises as much as it does confirm Wilson's and Akerfeldt's pre-eminence in the field of contemporary Progressive music. 

"We never discussed what we were going to do," recalls Akerfeldt. "I went down to hang out at Steven's house, and we drank wine and talked about music, but neither of us had anything prepared. We wrote the song Drag Ropes - Storm Corrosion's opening track - that first night, and we both thought it was pretty cool. We'd never heard anything like it and it doesn't really sound like our bands. We found our own niche, right then and there." 

"It was special, different and intriguing," agrees Wilson. "We ran in the opposite direction of the idea of a prog metal supergroup that people had been talking about and expecting from us. It was a chance to delve into more experimental ideas. We were being wilfully self-indulgent in the best possible way, making music to please ourselves." 

Wilson has mixed and contributed to several Opeth albums over the years, of course, but this is the first time that he and Akerfeldt have written music together. Recorded at Wilson's No Man's Land studio in leafy Hertfordshire, England, Storm Corrosion is a six-song exploration of the outer limits of these two artists' febrile creativity. As with their individual recent works - Wilson's Grace For Drowning and Opeth's Heritage, in particular - which have challenged their respective fan bases and added new, vibrant colours to once familiar aural palates, this album is an exercise in total musical freedom, wherein anything is possible and ideas are snatched from the ether and moulded into something utterly new, beguiling, disturbing, and otherworldly. From the sprawling, multi-faceted dynamic splurge of Drag Ropes and the unsettling sweep of title track through to the fragile menace of the closing Ljudet Innan (which means "ancient music" in Swedish), Storm Corrosion is an epic, disorientating trip. 

"You can hear it in Opeth and in my music, the idea of taking something beautiful and destroying it," explains Wilson. "We have both always loved the idea of discord, of beauty, and ugliness side by side. Without being too pretentious, that's what life is like, so you hear a lot more of that coming out in Storm Corrosion. It's heavy, but without the use of the metal vocabulary. You can hear that on Grace For Drowning and on Heritage too. So I think, in many ways, this is the completion of a trilogy." 

"For me, self-indulgence is one of the fundamental things about being an artist," Wilson concludes. "Do not make music or art to please other people. We just got together and it poured out of us. With this record you're entering into a very unusual and unfamiliar sonic universe and that's a very exciting thing to be part of."