Piano Magic

The music of Piano Magic represents the lucid dream, that transitory moment of consciousness right before waking from the anxieties, the spectres and the metallic unease that hovered over Nineties rock, crystallised in “Low Birth Weight” (Rocket Girl, 1999), and that carried us, unsteady and dazed, into the new millennium. Just as guitars seemed to have already said everything they could say, as the Radiohead had presumed with “Kid A” (Capitol, 2000) and “Amnesiac” (Capitol, 2001), the ensemble led by English guitarist Glen Johnson made the case for their regeneration in the form of what became known as “ghost rock”, giving sonic shape to the slowcore ghost lingering within wave music and dressing it up with folk textures and gothic shades, rock surges and blues grooves, in tune with the productions of Tindersticks and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in the 2000s, but also of Vini Reilly's Durutti Column project from the early 1980s.

“The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic” follows the more structured and ambitious production of “Writers Without Homes”, their first release under the 4AD banner, which was deemed too eclectic and uneven. But it's precisely this “Piano Magic” essence that manages to define Johnson's ensemble on their seventh album, recorded and mixed between London's Fortress and Murder Mile studios, and released on the Spanish label Green Ufo's, with a quintet line-up that would become stable around Johnson himself (vocals, lyrics, guitars, keyboards), alongside Alasdair Steer (bass, radio), Jerome Tcherneyan (drums, percussion, keyboards), Franck Alba (guitars) and James Topham (keyboards and viola). In an interview with OndaRock, Glen describes the record as “the most complete portrait of my emotions”, the outcome of a dark, melancholy period of his life reinvigorated by the writing and recording of the album, which he regards as a “monument” within his own discography.

One of Piano Magic's undeniable qualities is their ability to conjure moods, sketch out states of mind and outline whole worlds of imagination through songwriting that is essential in itself — hence the constant references to Nick Drake — yet remarkably rich in harmonic detail and tonal texture. Despite Piano Magic's foray into film at the time — with the soundtrack to Bigas Luna's “Son De Mar” (4AD, 2001) — “The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic”, rather than being a work of cinematic music, plays out as an almanac of inventions for storytellers at the mixing desk, tormented by a Montale-like “male di vivere”, in which the minimal, traditional and repeated skeleton of the songs is enriched with a wealth of linguistic nuances and visionary sonic flashes. The album opens precisely this way, with the sadcore heartache of “Saint Marie”, defined by Piano Magic's two main tendencies — minimal folk and baroque pop — drawing on some of their earlier sonic devices while moving away from the dream-pop of their early releases:

Out of season, out of heart

I cross you off beneath the stars

Autumn leaves a nasty scar

And with the leaves, the heart departs

You’re off the map

You’ve left the book

I’m off my head and treading luck

And it’s too late to call you up

The heart migrates

It comes unstuck

The track would be re-recorded shortly after with Alan Sparhawk of Low for the self-titled EP released the following year, laying bare those slowcore intentions in electro guise, born of ideas that were very much of the moment — the same years in which Lali Puna released “Scary World Theory” (Morr Music, 2001), Notwist released “Neon Golden” (City Slang, 2002), Tarwater released “Dwellers On The Threshold” (Letfield, 2002), and Low themselves released “Trust” (Kranky, 2002).

Along this same line comes the exceedingly delicate ballad “The Unwritten Low”, where acoustic guitars and keyboards accompany the steady, wistful vocals of French songwriter Angele David-Guillou (Klima), later broken down into choral harmonies, tracing the emotions of a loss that goes unnoticed or unheard:

The unwritten law

But how can you sleep with my heart so loud?

Like a scream in a jar

Like the sound of a crowd

And way out at seaThe waves and the masts know that they’ve lost

That they’re heading for rocks

But the captain’s adrift in dreams of dry land

Of the view from the lighthouse

Of my name in the sand

The album is dotted with many melancholy ballads, alternating between the voices of David-Guillou (“Help Me Warm This Frozen Heart”, “Comets”) and Johnson (“I'm The Teacher's Son”, “When I'm Done This Night Will Fear Me”), sometimes balanced together (“The Tollbooth Martyrs”).

But “The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic” is also crossed by bolder passages, expressing the emotion of someone resisting the pull of emptiness, from the electrified jolts of “Speed The Road, Rush The Lights” (“Caution is thrown to the wind / And it does not blow back / Geography, please be kind to me / For the miles apart are killing me / Tonight I would die to be by her side”) to the murky groove of “The End Of A Dark Quiet Year” (“I walk around with a knife in the cuff / But that's not gonna be enough”).

The album closes with two tracks that embody the moods, sounds and tremors running through the whole tracklist, first among them “Luxembourg Gardens”, with its spectral howls anticipating the minimal tolling of the rhythm section and the creaking strings that tighten around it, confirming the anguish of a loss:

Tonight, I can’t sleep, the heart’s all wires

The moon is widowed, the stars, retired

I’ll never travel and I’m always tired

But I still love you and I can’t lie

Don’t you ever go home?

The anguish of this question, posed within the walls of a room, is answered by the calm of "Comets", in which David-Guillou's voice, accompanied by the openings of keyboards and acoustic guitar à la Reilly, leaves a sense of relief and hope, reminding us that:

You just can’t wait for the right time

Because like comets, it could be the last time

You should always tell them you love them

In case you never see them again

The name Piano Magic made waves in the 2000s and was an inspiration for several artists, including Italian acts like Giardini di Mirò and Amor Fou. At a time when independent music was defined by the grace and power of the post-rock of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Piano Magic's delicate, refined songwriting offered a solution for those who still loved songs, with singable melodies, verses and choruses — something "The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic" embodied at its best.

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01/02/2026