Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.09.2016, Blaðsíða 22

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
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