ALTERNATIVE PRESS
(USA)
FEBRUARY 1999

David Hemingway

With the whir of keyboards, clicking percussion and the most brittle of voices, Piano Magic create disarmingly pretty and oddly evocative records. In the UK, the band have been aligned with the likes of Plone, ISAN and Komputer : groups who seem nostalgic for a future that never arrived. Piano Magic find their ideal in Kraftwerk's computer World of the imagined future of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. "The future hasn't happened quick enough for us" admits Glen Johnson, the one constant in Piano Magic's fluctuating line-up. "I'd definitely subscribe to the computers-the-size-of-houses and flying-cars sci-fi vision that became abandoned in the late 70's. The present day conception of the future is so common sense; so dull." Piano Magic's own retro-futurism aesthetic seems most pronounced in the delightful pneumatic clicks of for Engineers, released last year on the British indie Wurlitzer jukebox. "my dad's an engineer and For Engineers was a hand-on-heart tribute to him and his profession," says Johnson. "People take the manufacturing industry for granted these days. At school, my dad's generation was given these amazing little books with titles like The Secret Of Other People's Jobs and they'd be full of illustrations of steel mills and tractors."
The an Francisco-based indie Darla recently released the group's latest disc, A Trick Of The Sea, as part of it's Bliss-Out series. Johnson believes that Piano Magic's new British single, "Music for Annahbird" (Bad Jazz), captures explicitly what the group are about. On it, he says, they aim for some point equidistant between "industry and emotion."
"Annahbird" is a friend I love very much," says Johnson. "It's vital that you celebrate those you love with monumental statements while they're still around - be it with 50 foot high statues or 7-inch records on small indie labels."