* Dialog from „Wintersport“.
The This Mortal Coil-inspired Piano Magic were formed around 1996, and with their lo-fi experiments on their first EP's and first album "Popular Mechanics", were more of a bedroom project primarily by Glen Johnson. If you look at the list of musicians involved - Voice: Hazel Burfitt / Raechel Leigh & Sound: Dominic Chennel / Martin Cooper / Dick Rence / Paul Tornbohm / David Griffiths, there must have been quite a crowd in the bedroom. The emergence of this music came at a rather uninspired musical phase in my life. After the end of the second Summer of Love & all the warm, Ambienthouse and House oriented pop music, I was looking for something new, I remember Howe Gelb's Americana, Calexico, Trip Hop, Ambient Dub, bit by bit I found it too There was a kind of enthusiasm there, but it was projects like Rothko, ISAN, Labradford, Pan American or Piano Magic that brought that glow back in me. On “Popular Mechanics” the guitars are conspicuous by their absence. Well, at least almost. In “Wrong French” they hint at where the journey will take them in the future. The sound is otherwise purely electronic and the crackling and crackling is more than intended.
Nice side note: the Martin Cooper involved was and is credited in the credits on Discogs as THE Martin Cooper from Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. For years I saw this as a wow effect myself. But that doesn't seem to be true. But if you research it more closely, you won't find anything like that about it. His only other band appears to have been The Listening Pool. Today he is back in the line-up at the OMD Live concerts.
The 2 singles were "Wrong French" & "Wintersport/Cross country", including some non Album Tracks.
„Popular Mechanics begins deceptively with "Metal Coffee"'s screechily cartoonish menagerie clamouring for attention. Delicious crunches, scritches and grindings ensue. A pseudo-electric piano patiently measures out the time until a singer intones words like an electro chanteuse (literally) resurrected from the grave. The music falls away to be succeeded by birdsong, woodpigeons, sheep, ticking clocks, flocks of starlings, marshland birdlife. The ticking persists; it keeps hurrying you forward from scene to scene like Alice's White Rabbit. A dream logic is at play; it pulls you along, helpless to resist.
"Everything Works Beautifully". The sound of creaking, cranking, groaning - something like the sound of a windmill's ancient wooden machinery. Pans knock together. Water burbles. The sonic transmogrifies into the visual.
An arc of electricity joins noisily between two begrimed nodes. A foreboding hum accompanies a girlish voice; "I dream to dance on the factory floor to his lead piano amongst Russian lathes and metal curls". Where Boards of Canada are blurred, lambent, half obscured by blinding sunlight, Piano Magic are rough-hewn, grained, immediate but still mysterious. Simultaneously tactile and beyond reach. Earthy, grounded but still in danger of shocking you with unexpected voltage.
"Birth Of An Object" sounds out a manual poetry of machinic stanzas, marking the persistence of the industrial age in forgotten shopfloors still grinding out indistinct objects, a sort of industrial threnody. "Revolving Moth Cage" is perhaps that newborn object making its own song, given a life in time (four minutes and five seconds - no more, no less).
Suggesting Bruno Schulz's sun-drenched, dark-shadowed Street of Crocodiles: at once precisely delineated, beautiful and lost. Kept alive only in the faulty circuits of memory, the signal fades, the message lost in static. Chthonic rumbles marry together distinct, unalike elements to commence new, hybrid stories.
Listen to this as you fall asleep...I can almost see your dreams.“
- Colin Butteimer -
No comments:
Post a Comment