RECORD COLLECTOR
(UK)
MAY 2002
Issue 273

Piano Magic
Believe In Magic

David Hemingway

A new Piano Magic retrospective from lo-fi experimentalists Piano Magic traces the grey area between Kraftwerk and The Durutti Column. David Hemingway tunes in.

It's probable that Piano Magic were first conceived around the time an infant Glen Johnson first tapped out a sober funeral march on his mother's tiny Casio. Now, two or three decades later, the group create strange, time-frozen paeans to sub-librarians, engineers and winged, hairy-bodied stinging insects.
Evoking the imagined future of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Piano Magic's oddly beguiling debut Popular Mechanics lifted its name from a celebrated US DIY magazine.
"The record itself had no connection with the magazine," says group founder Johnson, "It just seemed a very apt title for a record that took its inspiration from pop and factory mechanisms. We were just Kraftwerk with guitars and radios. At least that's what we thought we were."
With the whir of keyboards, small beats and the effective deployment of brittle, doll-like voices, Popular Mechanics seemed to align Johnson et al with the likes of Plone and ISAN, artists who appeared nostalgic for a future that had never happened. Pretty, disturbing, charming and brutal, Popular Mechanics retraces lingering memories of snow globes based on Charles M Schulz characters, crap poetry and blood bonding. "Amongst Russian Lathes And Metal Curls" generates evocative images of "electrics, emery cloth and wires, breeze block dust, implements, logarithms". The band's future-retro aesthetic reached its apex with the delightful pneumatic percussion of subsequent single For Engineers, a hand-on-heart tribute to Johnson's father and his profession, released on the now inactive Wurlitzer Jukebox label. Conversely, however, Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer's fantastical Alice In Wonderland, with its theme of escape from such everyday existences seems equally inspirational to Piano Magic.
"Dominic (Chennell) and I were living in the same flat but he was making his tracks in his room and I was making tracks in the living room," recalls Johnson of Piano Magic's early incarnation, "When I was out, he'd use the four track. When he was out, I'd use it. I think we had the same influences at the time but they registered in very different ways. We both were in love with the more experimental records of early Kraftwerk and we both watched a lot of early Czech and Canadian animation. Dominic sort of took the sounds of doors opening and closing and so on, from the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer films we were watching and used it in his sound. And I took the Kraftwerk thing more literally. I was very into mechanical beats and melody. "For Engineers" is obviously a very clear cut example of the divide but it worked."
Johnson imagined Piano Magic eschewing live shows and instead having "have people casually dropping in for tea and just happening to stick some vocals down." The project was originally intended to having a fluctuating 'revolving door' membership policy of collaborators to sustain constant reinvention, with the group's 'sound' remaining in a state of perpetual flux. Johnson's friends and acquaintances - including members of Mazarin, Bitter Springs, Icebreaker, ISAN and Baby Birkin - have been drafted in as and when appropriate.
Do you share aesthetics with these collaborators?
"Not aesthetics, no. We tend to work with people who we think might 'fit' rather than basing a collaboration on their actual work. There's also a degree of perversity in getting certain people involved in music that they wouldn't normally be known for."
These days, however, the melancholic romanticists seemed to have settled around the core personnel of Johnson, Miguel Marin, Alasdair Steer and Jerome Tcherneyan. > Johnson says that, though he's the founder and only consistent member of the group, it isn't a dictatorship.
"I think I'm simply trusted by the rest of the band to supervise proceedings but they all have input. It's very much a 4-way split these days as to what appears on a track but I 'guide' the overall aesthetic."
After 1998's nautically-themed album-length single Bliss Out Vol 13: A Trick Of The Sea, Piano Magic appeared to morph into, in essence, a romantic, nostalgic guitar band, drawing comparison with luminaries such as My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance.
"I think there's romanticism in our music but that's not to say we're romantics," explains Johnson now, "The way the records sound is romantic but we don't aim for something - in quotes - 'romantic'. Does that make sense?"
"I've never had a long period of being happy," reads a sample on Low Birth Weight track "Not Fair", "Do you think anybody has? I think you can be peaceful for quite a long time but to be happy is different, isn't it?" The freaky sleeve of Piano Magic's second album featured stuffed cats passing around tea and biscuits served on fine china and rabbits sitting in lines of desks, clutching pencils like acquiescent Victorian school children. These eerie photographs complement the bracing, sometimes violent melancholy that sates the album. On "Secrets Look For Light", The Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers wants "an ugly wife - no man will look twice/I can fall asleep at night and dream of someone else." The final track makes explicit the influence of Disco Inferno on Piano Magic with a cover of the East London experimentalist's Waking Up.
Beautifully arranged and accentuating Piano Magic's nostalgia even further, Artist's Rifles merged militaristic, processional rhythms and chiming guitars to create an acutely touching release that evoked images of French libraries , cenotaphs and treasured photographs; strange baroque pop that seems to pay tribute to WW1 poets. Most explicitly, the title track looks back to 1914-1918 ("I've got your letter here/I've got your memories/Young men - as us/Broken soldiers"). Strangely, recurring ornithological imagery cuts through the release: the bird samples on "You And John Are Birds", the evocative image of "the dead bird on the gravel/neck snapped by last night's North Westerly" and the feathered vertebrates being catalogued in "The Index".
The group have recently signed to 4AD (notably citing the label's influence on the band via the likes of Dif Juz and Dead Can Dance) and have already released the soundtrack to (esoteric Spanish film-maker) Bigas Lunas's Son De Mar on the label. But ahead of a new album-proper East London's Rocket Girl has recently released Seasonally Affective: A Piano Magic Retrospective 1996-2000, compiling tracks from releases on labels such as Lissy's, Wurlitzer Jukebox, Debut, Acetone and Rocket Girl. On tracks like Music For Wasps and The Canadian Brought Us Snow nursery rhyme melodies unfold over distant shimmering electronics, the sounds of industry are coerced into touching beguiling epithets and percussion ticks like moths wings against halogen lighting.
Why Seasonally Affective, Glen?
"It's been said that our records were made for the colder seasons and I wouldn't dispute that, in the same way that they're best listened to on headphones in the early hours."