Aseptic home electronica
The Atman | Barcelona, Spain | 03/30/2008
(2 out of 5 stars)
"I purchased this cd in a recent Piano Magic gig I attended. (the PM show was astonishing. Something really powerful and touching. Congratulations!).
At the end of the show I went to the usual desk where you can buy some merchandasing stuff and cd's, and I saw this Textile Ranch cd, which I had found quite difficult to get in regular stores, so I purchased it with no doubt.
Textile Ranch is one of Glenn Johnson's side projects. The guy at the desk decribed this album as something much more "experimental" than other projects like Future Conditional.
Reality is that Textile Ranch's "Bird Heart in Wool" has no heart in the wool cocoon. I mean, everything is wool. I mean, where are emotions? This music is Glenn Johnson messing with his laptop at home on lazy afternoons. Quite funny for the one who makes it, but not for the listener, as the result is a bunch of "tracks" (definitely not songs) full of computer sounds that take you to nowhere. It really has some similar aspects to Piano Magic's debut album "Popular Mechanics", which had some tracks that were on a similar vein as these, but in that case, the aseptic electronica tracks were combined with other, more affecting moments (I could say "Wrong French" for example), which, at least, offered some reward to the patient listener.
In this case, though, there is very little reward. Only a couple of tracks at the end of the cd give you something as a "oh, do i like this finally?" moment, but it doesn't last much.
I guess the problem with Glenn Johnson or PM's side projects is that, being PM a very experimental outfit, there isn't much sense in trying to go further, because the best you can get, you will put it on a PM album, because everything is allowed there. So let's admit that this is something that is very far away from Piano Magic (musically, but also in terms of quality).
I'm sorry Glenn, but I didn't like this. With all respects."
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1