Jóhann Jóhannsson

Born in Iceland, Jóhann Jóhannsson was an award-winning composer, musician and producer. Often blending electronics with classical orchestrations, his work bears the diverse influences of Baroque, Minimalism, and drone-based and electro-acoustic music. Jóhannsson began studying piano and trombone at the age of eleven in his native Reykjavík. He abandoned formal musical training while at high school and, after studying literature and languages at university, he spent ten years writing music for and playing in indie rock bands, using guitars to compose feedback-drenched pieces and sculpt complex multi-layered soundscapes. By manipulating the resonances of acoustic instruments with digital processing, Jóhannsson created music that integrated acoustic and electronic sounds into something strikingly individual and new. His first solo album, Englabörn, was released in 2002 on the British Touch label. Its contents reveal influences spanning everything from Erik Satie, Bernard Herrmann, Purcell, and Moondog, to the electronic music issued by labels such as Mille Plateaux and Mego. Later works include Virðulegu Forsetar, scored for brass ensemble, electronic drones and percussion, and the orchestral albums Fordlândia and IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual, the latter inspired by the sounds of electromagnetic emissions from the first of IBM’s pioneering mainframe computers. In 2010, Jóhannsson collaborated with the American avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison on The Miners’ Hymns, a lyrical and reflective response to Britain’s lost industrial past and the heritage of the mining communities of Northeast England. The film’s accompanying score, conceived for live performance, combines brass band, pipe organ and electronics. In 2015, Drone Mass, Jóhannsson’s piece for string quartet, electronics, and vocal ensemble premiered at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In the same year, he completed his first short film as director, End of Summer, which charts a slow, hypnotic journey across the austere landscapes of the remote island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula, its onscreen images accompanied by a haunting soundtrack score. His film scores for Sicario and Arrival have been nominated for Oscar, BAFTA, Grammy and Critics’ Choice awards and he won the Golden Globe The Theory of Everything, James Marsh’s biographical drama based on the life of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His last film score was for The Mercy, James Marsh’s biopic of yachtsman Donald Crowhurst. In addition to his scores for Hollywood, Jóhann also created soundtracks for several acclaimed works of world cinema and for documentary films, including Lou Ye’s Mystery, János Szász’s The Notebook and Max Kestner’s Dreams in Copenhagen. Jóhannsson premiered another ambitious directorial project at Manchester International Festival in 2017 – Last and First Men. As an orchestral, chamber, and theatre composer, he wrote works for, among others, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Theatre of Voices, Det Norske Teatret and the Icelandic National Theatre. He made his Deutsche Grammophon debut with the release of his first studio album in six years, Orphée, in 2016, inspired by a range of readings of the Orpheus myth. It draws on a varied sonic palette, both acoustic and electronic, to explore the boundaries between darkness and light, contemplating impermanence, memory, and the elusive nature of beauty, ultimately celebrating art and its power of renewal. Jóhann Jóhannsson died in Berlin in 2018, at the age of 48.