I sleep tormented ghost of rock -
Almost three years since our last chat, we find Glen Johnson in coincidence of removal of his first album published under his own name, “Details Not Recorded”. Meanwhile, his propensity for febrile writing has led him to divide his efforts between Magic Piano and other diverse projects, each one characterized by different names.
Meanwhile his creative vitality predicts new targets, leaving a glimpse of further changes in musical direction.

We left after “Disaffected”: it seems that that album after all – at least in Italy – we are aware of Piano Magic, probably because of its dark atmosphere and the taste of some of his eighties songs. Effect that makes you be identified with that particular disc, compared to a long career and a lot more production?
Perhaps it is in Italy that we are identified with that particular disc, but I think the question is very relative, depending on the individual. Undoubtedly, “Disaffected” has broken through in several countries, but for example in Spain to be regarded album “definitive” by Piano Magic are pretty “Artists’ Rifles” and “Low Birth Weight.” From what I could observe, an obscure music, romantic, influenced by 80 years in Italy and Greece is more easily understood than in any other place. And certainly “Disaffected” fulfilled all three requirements.

Many of those who met with his Magic Piano “Disaffected” were bewildered and disappointed by the next part “Part-Monster” album inspired by anything instead of sounds. What was the stimulus for you that led you to create an album by the most immediate and revisit with a remarkable facility even guitar songs as “incurable” and “The Last Engineer”?
Simply, at that time we like to give a more “rock” to our music and playing on bigger stages than those to which we were accustomed to, we were also writing songs that required a higher volume and greater dynamic impact. Nevertheless, about half of “Part Monster” is quite calm!
If anyone is so surprised, well, we make music like that to us first and we would never think of adapting it to our fans without compromising our integrity.

The immediacy of “Part-Monster” multiplied by “Dark Horses” is something that you deliberately tried? It depends on your approach to how to play or the spirit in which write your songs?
I think this is an evolutionary process. What began primarily as an experimental project now is a band that tries to combine the testing with a real songwriting, which is essential to keep the songs for a long time in the mind. From a certain point of view, we have an enviable condition of being a cult band with a small but devoted following, while in another I think that we have not yet exploited the full potential of our band, which gives me a constant sense of but frustration is what leads me to go ahead and try to improve continuously and to make music better. “Part Monster” and “Dark Horses” are placed in a drawer of the wardrobe of the largest production of Piano Magic. But I do not think that the tray will open again. The next album, which we are writing right now, it will be very different from the last two.

Your lyrics continue to be as usual deep and very symbolic in many of the “Part-Monster” seems able to read a conclusion that human nature is one of the main reasons for his suffering. In recent work has changed your conception of the human condition. Moreover, how did affect the texts and the mood of your music?
I hate humans! Really, I would be happy if the human race was wiped out tomorrow, so that only plants and animals could proliferate in harmony with each other. At all, we destroyed the planet, and we destroyed ourselves. We are a scum!
Recently, I happened to think much about the machines. More will happen to aging longer question: “Things will get worse or better? Never cease to make war? Stop the killing of animals? Adolescents stop stabbing one another? Fascism can be overcome completely? Amanda Knox will be free?” . These are questions of this kind to keep me awake at night. Especially on Amanda Knox, I have to admit it.

“Dark Horses” has marked your transition to the label “cult” Make Mine Music: I read that it depended on a precise choice of artistic autonomy and freedom to spread your music. You can tell us something more on this and tell how you came into contact with them?
We would never end up on a major, primarily because we do not sell many records, then we are too old, outmoded and do not accept compromises. I had a long experience with the conventional music industry, and has left me a bad feeling. Almost all the independent labels have the same defects of the majors, with the difference that at least they know what they are doing. Most of the indie-label continues to stand on enthusiasm starting a couple of people who have made an argument like “I love music, so why not put a label?”. But when it comes to hard work, promote the discs to be punctual in paying the band and share the revenue things become different. Simply, I was tired of working with labels that were inept a lot of words but no facts.
At least with Make Mine Music, we have full control of everything we do. We publish anything we want when we want. We have a worldwide distribution through Cargo, excellent relations with major mail order such as Norman and Boomkat and then we paid automatically based on sales. The latter is very important: if a label does not pay every six months, as well as by contract, how do you continue to exist? By Make Mine Music no longer have to worry about it.
From a less formal, known for years Scott Sinfield (aka Portal), one of the co-founders of the label, and from him I learned the unique modus operandi of Make Mine Music, which always fascinated me, to become a real alternative the terrible situation where we were. Moreover, I greatly affecting the band for the label, such as July Skies, Epic45 and Portal.

Make Mine Music For now comes an album on your behalf: you can tell the reason for this choice and explain something of the title and the beautiful artwork?
I am a very prolific author. Every day pass to your computer several hours, filling up my hard-disk music for Piano Magic, Textile Ranch, Future Conditional, or many other unnamed projects.
At a time when the Piano Magic were still as band I thought of doing a solo while the other members of the band to wake up. It is a hard experimental than what Piano Magic have become at this time. There are Waltzer and baroque influences, with some added ‘by Leonard Cohen, Bjork, and Disco Inferno.
The artwork came while surfing on MySpace, when I ran into beautiful works of American oil painter who is called Julia Haw, who is also a fan of Piano Magic. Then I asked if you could paint something for the cover of my solo album and she has willingly agreed to, by choosing his work “The Headless Surgeon.” Instead of the twelve page booklet of texts were made by Gerald Tournier, the French band For The Chosen Few.
I want that ‘artwork of my disks is to effect, as the music contained therein, indeed even more! I do not have time for downloads, I am old, I want something that we can hold and cherish for the rest of life, not something that will disappear from your iTunes library when your computer no longer work. I think all those bands whose legacy will be the only mp3! Will be on their death-bed to sigh “Had we recorded the vinyl!” Has!

Piano Magic, Textile Ranch, Future Conditional, Glen Johnson: different names for a music that always shows your footprint recognizable, even in its diversity. But where Glen Johnson is going today? And what we have to wait on your next production?
In all honesty, I can not just stop! Now we are working hard on a new album of Piano Magic, which should see the light by September. There is also an album by Future Conditional that is beginning to take shape, and then I enjoyed it so much to make the solo album that I have planned a four-track Ep on tape by moving to a new Italian label that is partly directed by Jukka Reverberi of Giardini Di Miro, the Secret Furry Hole.

You’ll be aware of the growing popularity of Piano Magic in Italy think of going back soon to play here?
Really is on the rise?
Well, yes, we can return, we are planning concerts in Italy this year, perhaps as early as summer.

(05/04/2009)

A little less than a year after his last work, the acclaimed “Disaffected” that Piano Magic has anointed as one of the most original reality of the scene-wave pop (but not only), Glen Johnson, the mind of changing this project from ten-year period, tells us – as a man, and as a musician first – the feelings that inspired his compositions.
Its availability, coupled with the ability to speak with an open heart of his emotional past and present, has a simple but troubled exchange of mail an opportunity to learn about an artist sensitive and refined, through the direct and profound style that succeeds so well to express in music.

Firstly, Piano Magic is one of the most versatile on the current scene, able to cross genres and definitions. This depends on a precise choice of fund artistic or mainly by motions of your mind, at the various times when writing?
It is interesting to hear us say that we are able to cross genres, it is our clear intention to do so. Just do the music we want, without worrying too much to our ideal location on the map of music. Without doubt our state of mind have an important role in the composition of music. Usually, they are my texts to dictate the feeling of the songs and, as you probably notice, most of the time are invariably introspective, melancholic, disillusioned. Yet, this could lead to conclusions on my way of being, because, as anyone who knows me would testify, I am a pretty happy person.

In which of your albums you think you have expressed your best way of understanding the life and music?
Well, all are in their own way a moment of my life and I am pleased how each of them has succeeded. Sure, I could retrace all, removing every trace of which are not so sure, but basically those discs are what they are. However, it seems to me that “The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic” is the most accomplished fresco of my emotions. I refer to a depressing, dark, a period which, ironically, forget really happy if there were no damned this “monument” to remind.

Speaking of “Disaffected” (but a little good ‘for all your productions), I wrote that you are an artist out of time but not for this anachronistic. You could have indifferently write music in the 80s or during the full 90, so I think you would not be anything for the word “influence”, but believe that by listening to your music from those years may have influenced your sensibilities music, or could have been the same even in past decades?
Of course we are still very happily “out of time”! Be lying if I said that, personally, I have not been influenced by some artists and “movements” in contemporary music – from the Velvet Underground to Nick Drake, from the synth-pop of the early ’80s to the Smiths, from production of Factory Records and 4AD up groups progressive of the early 90s, as Disco Inferno. These are the discs that I recall and then those who have more influence on me as author and composer. And I am not ashamed of any of them.
I recently exchanged emails with David Tibet of Current 93, in which he said, among other things, that his influences go back to ten years before the mine, then I think we probably live in different temporal contexts.

You are really the prototype of the ‘European artist “now consists of Piano Magic for three quarters by French musicians and the last two albums have been published by a small Spanish label. It appears that you have a close bond with a Mediterranean sensibility, or “Latin”, but where is that really beats your heart?
My heart is flying everywhere, fortunately! But I feel more “alive” in Europe – and I refer to Europe outside of England, which is a small island. I appreciate and envy culture, romance, people (err, not all …) and thus, by comparison, have always been disillusioned with respect to England. Piano Magic absorbs its inspiration mainly from the environment and the countryside, I could say, from Perugia to Landes, in Valencia …

In your texts are recurrent references to London ( “Comets” and “I Must Leave London”, to name just the most recent): You have a bond so strong with the city, or London is for you rather a kind of “place of ‘soul’?
I have a love / hate with London. The city loves me, and I hate. At this time (as in the last nine years), I must live here to work, or the band or for personal matters, but I try to always look beyond the fence of my present life, to imagine them in some other place . And there are so many reasons why I could not move to Paris tomorrow.

What is your state of mind ideal for dial? Depends on your momentary feelings, or your songs are born in an incremental and more technical?
First of all emotions. The group now has only cemented an alchemy, so after having played together for so long, at any moment we could literally build a song only from the text. Some songs are written in our test study, but the text must first be written by me, at home, next to a bottle of wine in front of the photos of my girlfriend died.

It seems that your music is always suspended between fascinating and different aesthetic – simplifying, the soundtrack to the pop, the wave of electronics – but, whatever aspect it assumes, however, an impression has distinctive and easily recognizable. Could this be proof that schedules and definitions are less important than the emotions and that the listener must go beyond a superficial approach to your music?
Anything we do sounds like Piano Magic, this is the central and most important of our songs. To be really honest, the fact that we work in different genres is something that goes beyond our awareness. Somewhere, deep in my mind there is an intention to create a great music, romantic, epic, a kind of anthem that manages to move her hearers – something like “Dead Can Dance meets Low”! – But I am still very far from that, and it is terribly frustrating. We do what we can, given our limited resources.

You started playing keyboards-toy, then you have gradually developed your approach to electronics in the compositions of recent years, the impetuous drumming of “Saint Marie” with minimal traces of ED and glacial “Open Cast Heart” until all unexpected step dance (very’80s) of “Disaffected” and “Deleted Scenes”. So what is your relationship with the electronic instrumentation and, more importantly, what kind of electronic prefers?
I must point out that only I, Cedric Jerome and we are interested in electronic music. In Franck, however, and nothing. But, yes, the three heads “techno” of the band have a deep love for all types of electronics, from Kraftwerk to Soft Cell, with Depeche Mode, the New Order, to Aphex Twin, to the recent production of labels or Type City Center Offices. We are fortunate to live near a great store of electronic music (Smallfish Records), which supplies us according to our wishes. My first love with electronics dates back to the early 90s, when I tried to emulate Cabaret Voltaire, and Soft Cell with a bad keyboard from Yamaha peanuts, and I, of course, I still in my electronic music project personnel Textile Ranch and most recently (with Cedric), in Future Conditional.

You seem to perennial search for a form of music and voice, in particular, Piano Magic has hosted several female voices, from Rachel Leigh to Angele David-Gilliou. The decision to entrust some of your songs to a female voice comes when compose or, subsequently, according to some characteristic of the songs themselves?
In the early days of Piano Magic, who simply wanted to sing our songs! The only criterion was to find a few people, women, who had a semi-decent voice. The voice of Rachel, fortunately, it seemed that of a porcelain doll of Victorian times. Yet, I think that Angela is the quintessential voice of Piano Magic, warm and cold at the same time, romantic, out of time. Recently he sang with Hubert-Felix Thiefaine and previously with Etienne Daho, and also in the French rock group, Ginger Ale (whose album is out in January on the label Discograph). Moreover, in the spring released his solo album under the pseudonym Klima on Peacefrog (label Nouvelle Vague and José González). I think that is about to become a true star. Now that I know well, both as a person and as a singer, I tend to write especially for her.

Although many employees have changed in recent Piano Magic album seems to have stabilized at a steady band. If so, you’ve finally found an optimal size of the band? And if so, by what has been determined by the many changes in line-up of the past?
It seems to me that now the band is almost stable for five years – since Jerome and Alasdair-members on a permanent basis. Together with me, they were the backbone of the band in it now long term. But, certainly, Franck was enlisted because I am a guitarist really limited, but he is much more experienced than me, because even teaches guitar. And the contributions of Cedric the keyboard felt much need to give greater depth to the sound. Now we have stabilized for about a year. While occasionally someone else revolves around us, as Angele and John Grant of the Czars. Essentially, these are people who believe in a position to secure for our music a contribution that we could not otherwise provide. Yet depth, resonance and emotion. I can not sing, you have to understand. My voice is unstable, sickly.

What do you think of “post-rock”? And the music that is usually included in it? Feeling “post-something”?
To anyone who asks us the post-rock always respond the same way: what is it? The rock should not be dead to be a post-rock? And the rock is indeed alive and still enjoys excellent health. We do not feel part of any “scene” or in any particular aesthetic. And certainly do not feel similar to Mogwai or inspired by them.

Your writing often seems restless and feverish, your productions have always been frequent, what circles in writing? Can be interpreted as a vehicle to vent?
An outlet or an exorcism, maybe. I am well aware to disclose my private life, but for me it is not a problem if someone is interested in my tribulations. I like that the music is taken up and lived by listening, that the interpreters as referring to himself, rather than analyze too deeply why I have written a thing or the other. When I was a kid, certainly did not imagine Morrissey in front of a cemetery we imagined myself.

Your productions range from an ethereal songwriting and dilated to more “concrete” in the last two albums, which covered developments in your composition – so that now a sound like “Son De Mar” is outside of your projects, or think to be able to return to write music specifically for a film or a matched it?
We are waiting for a call, since we finished “Son De Mar”, but so far no one else has taken the trouble of picking up the phone for it. We are certainly capable of writing music for film, probably now more than ever, but it seems that most of the film production companies tend to use existing tracks in order to associate the images. However one of our songs, “You Can Hear The Room”, was used this week for an American police, “CSI.”
There was a clear decision to “write songs”, as an alternative to “make noise” when it came to putting a hand “Disaffected”. We wanted to try and sell more records, but at the same time felt the need to test whether we could make a pop-song melody, even “catchy.” I believe that “Jacknifed” (song included in the single edition of Green ufos “Disaffected”, ndr) closely represents the point at which we arrived. So I think that there is so much wanted to take this path, we will be very difficult to go back right now. I am sure that the next album will be melodic as “Disaffected,” if not more. Yet, even though it may seem absurd, at this time we are listening very bands like Liars, which are exactly in the opposite direction.

In your songs there is often a sense of lack, of absence, which suggests to the issues so dear to the My Bloody Valentine, some fifteen years ago, yet at times the impetus and the pine for these failings, it seems that trying to appease , to suffocate under a cold surface, which responds to an attitude of your mind or depends only on your relationship with writing?
All that I am concerned has to do with lack. I live in the past. I am at three in the night, the house of my ex-girlfriends, crying … No, I do not, but I insist too much on what is past and can never return, as if I am opposed to a bright and beautiful future. I do not know if we are cold. Rather tend to think that our nostalgia is very human, very warm.

Your lyrics often speak of ghosts, especially those of “Disaffected” truly believe in their existence or these ghosts are real-life memories of which you can not get rid of and then try to do in music?
Well, the ghosts whom I refer are the only people who are no longer part of my life – not necessarily death. It is a metaphor. If you believe in their existence? I have not seen any evidence, recently, despite some interesting experience when I was younger, which I could give my negative energy.

“Love & Music” could be a perfect anthem for all those who live music as a vehicle of their own emotions, but which of the two elements you communicate more emotions in your life, and how? Think you can never disaffection of one of them?
Love is far more powerful than the music, but since the Beatles had already written “All You Need Is Love”, I had invented something on the subject. I could certainly live without playing and make records, but I need to listen to music. I have over a thousand CDs and I have no intention to discard. But, yes, love is truly the center of life, without doubt. My companion, my family, my friends. The music is of marginal in comparison.

Finally, you are still convinced, as you wrote in “Writers Without Homes”, that “music can not save you from anything but silence?
The music is wonderfully overstated. Do what you want. It is inanimate. You are master of entrusting the feelings you want. Can I put on Nick Drake because I am sad? However, his music does not make me happy no more no sadder – I just have to be able to make myself more happy or more sad. Understand?