Structure
While its predecessor, Deadwing, consisted of nine separate tracks without any thematic continuity across the music, the songs on Fear of a Blank Planet seem to have a connection not just between the lyrics but also musically; every track flows into the next, comprising a single fifty-minute piece of music. Wilson said the idea was to make an album that could be listened to in one sitting, in contrast to some bands tendency to make very long records that do not maintain the attention of the listener. He described Fear of a Blank Planet as an homage to '70s records, whose moderate length helps the listener maintain focus:
"It was very much conceived in the way bands used to conceive of records in the '70s, where you've got two sides of vinyl, and you can lay down a piece of music which is around the 50-minute mark, which plays in a continuous way, and deals with the same subject matter, and tried to kind of immerse you in a world for that time. That's always been the Porcupine Tree way, but we've definitely taken it to the next level."
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
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