Atlantica - 01.11.2002, Blaðsíða 50

Henrik Björnsson: Tim Gain of Stereo-
lab once said in an interview that he
was sick of guitars, at least in the way
that most bands use them. Do you
share the same view?
Jóhann Jóhannsson: I think so. I think
it is an overused instrument in many
ways, especially in today’s music.
There’s a lot of very unimaginative
guitar work around, and you’ve got all
these bands on TV and the radio who
sound exactly the same.
HB: In your first band, Daisy Hill, you
used electric guitars, and you also
played guitar in Ham.... Do you still
play guitar at all?
JJ: No, not at all. I haven’t played it for
years...well, not since last year when I
played with Ham [the reunion gigs],
but I occasionally grab one when I
can’t get hold of a guitarist, like when
I’m doing a project, but it’s very rare
nowadays. The guitar is a perfectly
valid instrument. It’s just an instru-
ment, but it depends on how you use
it; if you’re a crap musician, you’re
crap on any instrument. But if you’re
good, you’re good no matter what you
use.
HB: With Apparat you’re making some
rather heavy rock ‘n’ roll songs with
just as much punch as people make
with guitars.
JJ: Well, it’s a different kind of punch.
I think that maybe that is what’s inter-
esting about Apparat. We are using
i-site ORGAN❍
48 A T L A N T I C A
the keyboards in a different way...
maybe bands like Suicide came the
closest to doing it because they were
using keyboards more as drone instru-
ments; doing very, very simple things.
And they were using distortion and
they were using reverb and... just basi-
cally doing rock ’n’ roll with keyboards
and just keeping it as minimal as possi-
ble. We’re not as minimal as Suicide. I
think we sort of compose more, or we
sort of develop the ideas further a bit,
without being too complex. We really
like simple ideas and we like to present
them as simply as possible.
HB: The engineer (Vidar Hákon
Vidarsson), when he was mixing the
album with you, said: “This is crazy.
They’re doing metal with organs only.”
He had never mixed anything like this
before. Mixing the album, was it quite
difficult compared to other music you
have mixed before?
JJ: Yeah, it was probably the hardest
album anyone of us had ever done.
And it took a very long time to figure
out how to do it. We tried many differ-
ent ways, we got better progressively,
and by the end we had found a really
good way of working. We had very lim-
ited choices because we only use these
certain types of instruments. You know,
we can’t go and put a piano some-
where, and we can’t go and get some
strings or a choir or an accordion or
something, because we have limited
ourselves to just using electric organs
and old synthesizers.
HB: How did Apparat come about? The
line-up of four organs?
JJ: I was asked to get together some
musicians for a ‘Kitchen Motors’ event
which was organized in the fall of 1999.
It was part of the RUREK jazz festival
actually, and I had the idea of getting
together four electric organ players and
just see what would happen. Maybe this
was inspired by music I was listening to
at the time, which was early minimalist
music by people like Steve Reich, who
wrote a lot of music for four or several
keyboard players. And then, when we
got together and started playing, it start-
ed to evolve very quickly and we found
that we had something in common and
that we had good chemistry going on.
So after this first concert we decided to
continue. First the music was mainly
improvised, but now it’s all getting more
and more composed so we’re moving
away from improvising soundscapes...
we’ve been allowed to develop for three
years. We actually started writing and
recording the album in 1999.
HB: Did you have a drummer to begin
with?
JJ: No. In the first concerts it was just
four organs, but then we decided to add
a drummer the year after, in early 2000.
After we added the drummer the focus
started to change very much. We
already had the distortion element, that
sort of wall of sound element, but there
was more of a rock edge that came in
when we added the drummer.
JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON HAS BEEN MAKING MUSIC SINCE HE WAS A TEENAGER. HE
FORMED HIS FIRST BAND, DAISY HILL PUPPY FARM, AFTER ONE LISTEN TO THE
STOOGES’ FIRST ALBUM, AND SINCE THAT BAND’S DEMISE, ONE DECADE AGO, HE HAS
BEEN INVOLVED IN NUMEROUS PROJECTS, INCLUDING LEGENDARY ROCK BAND HAM
AND ELECTRO-POP GROUP L.H.O.O.Q. LAST OCTOBER SAW THE RELEASE OF
ENGLABÖRN (ON THE TOUCH LABEL), JÓHANN’S BEAUTIFUL MINIMALIST SOUNDTRACK
TO THE PLAY BY HÁVAR SIGURJÓNSSON. HOWEVER, THE SUBJECT OF THIS INTERVIEW
IS HIS LATEST COLLABORATIVE PROJECT, APPARAT ORGAN QUARTET. THEY ARE WHAT
THEIR NAME SUGGESTS, A QUARTET, PLUS A DRUMMER, OR QUOTING THE GROUP:
“LIKE ALL GOOD QUARTETS, WE ARE FIVE.” WITH INFLUENCES INCLUDING STEVE REICH,
SUICIDE AND KRAFTWERK, AND A SOUND ALL THEIR OWN, THEY HAVE CREATED A FAN-
TASTIC DEBUT ALBUM AND ARE ON THEIR WAY TO CONQUER THE WORLD, ALTHOUGH
OUTER SPACE IS WHERE THEIR MUSIC SEEMS TO COME FROM. JÓHANN, HOWEVER,
COMES FROM REYKJAVÍK, AS DOES THIS WRITER, SO WE PICKED THE PERFECT LOCA-
TION FOR AN INTERVIEW AT HOTEL HOLT’S SHERRY LOUNGE, AND STARTED TALKING
OVER COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, NEITHER OF WHICH JÓHANN TOUCHED.
Jóhann Jóhannsson
of Apparat Organ Quartet
shares his mind
and space with
Henrik Björnsson.
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