Indie jack-of-all-trades Glen Johnson conjures up another
little gem of pop craftsmanship.
His main project Piano Magic is already an extraordinary
force in recent years of independent music, and this album
only fully confirms his extraordinary compositional skills.
Sketches, truncated songs, voices, noises. Examining the tracks one by one
would never capture the true meaning of this masterwork.
Sounds stolen from the world,
uprooted from the simple flow of time. Time that treads a path of
glittering beauty. Something familiar can be felt running through the
tracks. We lose ourselves and find ourselves again before this jumble of tones
materials, essential, granite-hard.
Loops, creaks, beats, whistles,
yearnings, disintegrations, overflowing sonic extraneousness.
Electronics go
hand in hand with all of this, tagging along as if following the same main
road, as if there were no distinction between what is concrete and what is
fake.
The sounds created by machines reproduce an obsessive beat, thick,
invasive, evanescent. A touch of non-humanity lent to a shamelessly pure
sound.
Deformed acousticity, never present in its
natural form. Instruments disguised, steered off course, diverted, destabilized. Percussion,
xylophone, guitar touches, who knows what other instruments. The result is
something crystalline, decisive, precise.
The voices stay outside of it.
They don't want to be too intrusive, they simply don't feel like it. They intone their
presence with subtle, minimal, measured, delicate words. Women's voices,
the very essence of sweetness.
Listening to this record is like
being transported to a different world, perfect, elegant.
Never an intrusion, never
an ill-intentioned interference. Our body is never assailed. Our
ears are never threatened. Absolute peace reigns in our
mind. We let ourselves be carried away by these lands that speak, that never stop
emanating something called songs. Songs we'd want to hear
every time we're alone, whenever our spirit is afflicted by unspeakable
pains. Songs steeped in a golden aura, coated in a
gleaming patina, enriched with earthly wisdom.
A work with no
limits of classification, impossible to place within any musical movement.
All it takes to define it is to listen. Calmly and passionately. In front of a fire. With
eyes closed. Alone. Admiring without saying a word. In silence.
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30/04/2026
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Alessandro Biancalana, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.