Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.09.2016, Blaðsíða 22

with a lot of care. I saw ‘Blade Run-
ner’ when it came out in 1982, at Aus-
turbæjarbíó, when I was thirteen or
fourteen. I remember it vividly. It was
the first version, with the narration
and the happy ending. I loved it from
the beginning. I was someone who’d
delved deeply into Philip K. Dick, so
someone filming that novel was a huge
deal for me. They managed to create
something really new and original—
that’s based on Dick’s work, but creates
its own world.”
Jóhann won’t be drawn on the di-
rection the score might take, but he
does have a well known interest in
vintage synths and organs, as heard
in his work with the Apparat Organ
Quartet. “Vangelis was a big influence
on me,” he recalls. “It’s not something
I’d quote as an influence in my work
over the last twenty years or so, but
it’s certainly there as a very vivid early
influence. It’s a world I feel very com-
fortable entering. It’s not a strange
world to me. Everything in that film
and everything connected to it has in-
formed my life. It’s one of those dream
projects. It’s a very exciting time.”
Narratives and frames
Film soundtracks are just one strand
of Jóhann’s practise. In fact, this blos-
soming chapter of his career began
when he started receiving requests to
license his solo work for use in films
and documentaries. His solo work
touches on minimalist electronica,
drones, and contemporary composi-
tion, with a concept-driven edge.
“One of my obsessions in my solo
work is creating some kind of narra-
tive or conceptual frame around most-
ly instrumental music,” he explains.
“For me, the framework around it gives
me the frame to work in. With films,
you have the context and story—when
I work on my solo stuff, I create the
narrative, and the whole concept.”
This approach perhaps comes from
Jóhann’s background as a student of
literature and language. “My back-
ground isn’t really in music,” he says,
“so I lean naturally towards a more
conceptual, narrative-driven way of
writing. You can hear it on ‘IBM 1401’
and ‘Fordlandia’ as well, and the new
album ‘Orphée’ also.”
This expanded practise of com-
position allows Jóhann to create rich
worlds within his albums by stringing
together a web of reference points, all
connected to a central theme. “It makes
the associations between the music
and the concept concrete—between
the context, the artwork, the titles, and
the music,” he enthuses. “With Spo-
tify and iTunes, a lot of that is lost on
people these days. If you don’t have the
record, you don’t have the liner notes—
just a piece of instrumental music
with a strange title. You’d have to do
some Googling to find the meaning.”
And that’s not enough for Jóhann,
who places great importance on the
conceptual content of each work. “It
all comes from this interest in having
this oblique narrative attached to the
music,” he says. “It always has to have
a non-musical narrative idea for me to
consider it something I can present.”
Orpheus rising
His eighth solo album, ‘Orphée’, is a
series of quiet, mournful pieces that
spiral upwards seemingly endlessly. It
developed differently from his usual
method of establishing a foundational
concept early on.
“This time, I just started writing
music,” Jóhann says. “I based it around
an endless set of variations, around a
chord progression that feels like it’s
forever flowing upwards. The theme
recurs throughout the record, and is
present in some form in many of the
pieces. Everything on the record grew
from that. It’s not always apparent—
sometimes you don’t hear the origin
any more—but they’re offshoots that
organically grew from the same plant.”
The record still developed a wider
theme, gleaned from the worlds of
mythology, literature and film. “One
of the variations lent itself to vocals, so
I decided to do a choir piece with The-
atre of Voices,” he explains. “I tend to
use existing text—I don’t really write. I
tend to go for old poems. I found a sec-
tion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where
he retells the story of Orpheus. Maybe
because of this sense of the music
flowing upward, that oft-retold story
became the thread.”
Jóhann went about exploring the
various retellings of the Orpheus
myth, including the 1950 Jean Cocteau
film ‘Orpheus’. “It’s old favourite of
mine,” says Jóhann. “There’s a section
where Jean Marais is listening to his
car radio, and he picks up these strange
voices on the shortwave spectrum. It’s
a voice intoning a strange sequence
of words, num-
bers and letters,
that sounds like
abstract beat po-
etry.”
The scene re-
curs a few times
in the fi lm, be-
coming a motif.
“Cocteau based
t h i s on t ra n s-
m i s s i o n s t h a t
he heard during
WWII, from the
British side,” he
says. “During the
Cold War, these
t r a n s m i s s i on s
could be heard quite frequently, and
there are vast archives of them—very
mechanical, very emotionless, robotic,
usually female voices, repeating se-
quences in various languages—Span-
ish, English, Russian, Chinese. It’s
haunting and beautiful, like uninten-
tional poetry. Nobody owns up to being
the origin of these transmissions, but
they’re clearly intelligence agencies at
work. They still exist even now. In the
piece, they become like voices from
another world—strange, haunting,
oblique and mysterious messages.”
Cultivating space
Creating such involved works along-
side a demanding schedule of scoring
films isn’t always easy. Jóhann’s last
solo album was ‘Fordlandia’, released
in 2008, and he cites time pressures as
one of the main reasons for the long gap.
“‘Orphée’ is my first solo album in
a great many years,” says Jóhann. “I
started writing the first pieces and
ideas in 2009. I’d find a week here or
a week there—I did a string quartet
recording in 2010, and some pipe or-
gans and keyboards in 2011. The film
music activity intensified from 2012
onwards. It was harder to find space
to finish it.”
He remains mindful of cultivating
space for the various aspects of his
work to flourish. “I have to be aware
of time,” says Jóhann, “so I have to
say no to some exciting film projects.
Sometimes it genuinely pains me to
say no—but it’s very important for
me to make space for solo work. What
I do on my own albums informs the
score work, and vice-versa. There’s a
genuinely synergy and symbiosis hap-
pening.”
Both strands of Jóhann’s work have
their upsides—the solo work is soli-
tary by nature, whereas film scoring
On Blade Runner:
"WE ARE AWARE
THAT WE'RE HAN-
DLING A DELICATE,
PRECIOUS OBJECT
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 14 — 2016
22
FEATURE