Reykjavík Grapevine - 12.01.2007, Side 32

RVK_GV_01_007_INTERVIEW_10_REYKJAVÍK_GRAPEVINE_ISSUE 01_007_INTERVIEW/MUSIC
He used to play in some pretty rough rock
bands. These days, Jóhann Jóhannsson
doesn’t employ loud, distorted guitars to get
his points across, yet reaches more ears than
ever before. The following interview details
the story of a certain transformation, one
that’s more subtle than you might assume.
It would be fair to say that Jóhann Jóhanns-
son is catching many of us by surprise. Al-
though he has been an active participant
in the Icelandic music scene since the early
90s, when his shoegaze/drone band Daisy
Hill Puppy Farm made a small dent in the
wall of death-metal that then amounted to
the Reykjavík underground, he has mostly
worked behind the scenes or within the con-
fines of bands until recently. A glance at his
biography will reveal that he has been a driv-
ing force within progressive Icelandic music
for the last decade; his co-founding of the
Kitchen Motors collective/label and the Ap-
parat Organ Quartet speaks volumes in and
of itself, as anyone remotely familiar with
modern Icelandic music can tell you. None-
theless, the nature of his work has ensured
that his name hasn’t exactly rolled off the
tongues of the discriminating public.
This has been slowly changing since the
2002 release of his solo début, a score for
Icelandic play Englabörn. The piece garnered
international critical and public acclaim,
which has increased at steady rate with each
of his subsequent projects. Reviews of his
latest release, the concept piece IBM 1401,
a User’s Manual, are almost uniformly sprin-
kled with the types of positive superlatives
and exclamation marks usually reserved for
Iceland’s top cultural exports, Björk and Sigur
Rós.
The Grapevine briefly convened with
Jóhannsson over cups of coffee the day after
the much-anticipated Sugarcubes reunion.
His discussion of the Sugarcubes show and
its opening acts (“múm were a lot of fun,
many new things going on… I was expect-
ing more new material from Rass, but they
preferred to stick with the classics and did
a good job of it”) betrays him as an obvi-
ous music enthusiast, one who still keeps the
fan’s perspective on his own profession. Our
conversation slowly turns to the classic topic
of the motivation behind making music, and
if and why people should prefer their musi-
cians to be of an honest and sincere persua-
sion.
“The music I like certainly possesses more
of those qualities. On the other hand selling
records is no sin, and I think there are many
artists that are actually brilliant in serving
both masters, artistically unmatched how-
ever commercial they may be. I really respect
those artists, people like Abba and The Pet
Shop Boys. Those who pander to the mar-
ket while maintaining their artistic integrity
and avoiding lowest common denominators.
Such peaks in the pop landscape are very
rare however, and it’s hard to spot some-
thing of the sort today, although I admittedly
don’t really follow that scene. The latest to
surface might perhaps be someone like Mi-
chael Jackson or George Michael. Or maybe
El Perro Del Mar”
Throughout our conversation, Jóhanns-
son comes off as a soft-spoken and thought-
ful type, one who wishes to be taken seri-
ously, but actually warrants the notion, unlike
many of his peers. When asked if he enjoys
hip-hop, he ponders the question for quite a
while before answering that he mostly part-
ed ways with the style in 1990, when he lost
most of his interest in the genre: “The first
batch of Public Enemy records seemed holy
to me, their music managed to stretch into a
wide array of style, electro, concrete music,
punk, but I kind of stopped following it all
after that. There have of course been certain
artists within hip-hop that have moved me
since, but I suppose most of it remains un-
derground and I haven’t really had the time
to properly acquaint myself with it.”
A Movement in the Air
Ppopular on-line music database allmusic.
com listsJóhannsson in the Electronica cat-
egory. It might befit him, as most of his work
is done through a computer. However, al-
though his music contains some elements of
what Americans refer to as Electronica (and
Icelanders refer to as “electronic music”),
it is at times far removed from some of the
canons of that style. Egged on by a reporter,
he ponders what making electronic music
entails.
“You might say that everyone is an elec-
tronic musician these days, even the little kid
with an acoustic guitar who records all his
strumming on a laptop. Everybody’s using
the same instruments, except for maybe a
few retroheads like Devendra Banhart, who’s
an analogue freak that records everything on
tape. I feel that the “electronic musician” tag
really relates to anyone recording music to-
day, and that the term itself is both outdated
and degenerate. Not a definition at all, rather
a superficial label. When you’re working on
a computer, as most people do these days,
then it all winds up in the same digital form
and it’s only for academics to argue what the
source of the sound was, if it found form as a
movement in the air or as a movement in the
oscillator of some synth.”
So you’re not an “analogue freak”, you
don’t think it matters if music is recorded in
analogue or digital form, something many of
your colleagues feel strongly about?
“I don’t think it matters at all. For me, it’s
the end result. I really use a lot of analogue
instruments and all sorts of old relics, I get
the sound I am looking for through those
units but it’s not a religion. First and fore-
most, the tools are a means to a specific end,
and I mainly use computers because… well,
they’re here. Of course they give tremendous
opportunities for manipulation. But in any
case, I view them just the same as I view in-
struments, whether its an orchestra, an elec-
tric guitar or a Hammond organ. They’re all
just colours in a palette, tools to build with.”
Conceptual Backbones
As well as building a successful solo career,
Jóhannsson is also a constant collaborator to
artists in other fields. As mentioned above,
his solo début was in fact a score for the
play Englabörn, although not his first; he has
made various forays into writing music for
the theatre and film since the mid-nineties.
He has also lent his talent to other art forms,
in fact the aforementioned IBM 1401 was
originally written as an accompaniment to
a dance piece by renowned choreographer
Erna Ómarsdóttir, who cooperated with him
on forming the conceptual basis behind the
piece (for more info and behind the scenes,
visit: www.ausersmanual.com).
According to Jóhannsson, a conceptual
backbone of sorts is important to his works.
It provides structure and an underlying idea
that connects the dots and provides a whole-
ness. “I have problems sitting down and just
creating an “absolute” or “pure” music, the
kind that isn’t connected to anything but
itself. That’s one of the things I find diffi-
cult, and that’s probably why I’ve been at-
tracted to creating music for films and the-
Jóhann Jóhannsson: A User’s Manual
Text by Haukur Magnússon Photo by Skari