Piano Magic
London, United Kingdom5 reviews across 5 releases
Piano Magic was formed in London in 1996 as a studio project built around Glen Johnson, Dominic Chennell, and Dick Rance, with musicians entering and leaving rather than settling into a fixed roster. Johnson remained its axis. The early work treated electronic pulses and guitar as parts of small haunted narratives, often completed by guest voices. On A Trick of the Sea: Bliss Out, Volume 13, the nautical setting reached frozen waters and rusting ships, with spoken word leading to a GPS-like electronic fade. Low Birth Weight moved the group toward pastoral English folk filtered through shoegaze, with wispy vocals and distorted percussion. By Writers Without Homes, the music had expanded into lush orchestration and large guitar crescendos, while retaining a fixation on loss and isolated figures, including people confronted by strange deaths. It was a collective in method as well as name.
In 2008, Piano Magic moved to Make Mine Music, an artist-run label collective, after its period with 4AD. The group continued recording through the following decade, with Johnson still its only original member and the personnel changing around him. Its final concert took place at London's Lexington in December 2016, exactly twenty years after the first show. Johnson had described twenty years as a suitable point at which to stop, and no more formal reason was given. Closure followed on Second Language Music in January 2017, completing the band's recorded work. Afterward, Johnson continued releasing music through Second Language Music, the label he co-founded.
