Jóhann Jóhannsson

One of Iceland’s most endlessly inventive artists, the composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Jóhann Jóhannsson merged stylistic categories and erased distinctions among his independent recordings, joint ventures, and commissioned scores through instinctive fluidity and open-handed warmth. Classical, electronic, and ambient elements, lightly tinted with indie and metal hues, meshed with his instinctive narrative sense and emotional directness on pieces as personal as the 2002 debut Englabörn and as sweeping as 2008’s Fordlandia. In the same spirit, solo releases such as 2016’s Orphée carried narrative weight comparable to his Oscar-nominated scores for 2014’s The Theory of Everything and 2015’s Sicario. Scores written for smaller films, among them the 2011 documentary The Miner’s Hymns, proved equally substantial as any major-studio soundtrack. His sudden death in 2018 deprived music of a singular voice, though the final score Mandy confirmed he was still discovering fresh combinations of intense atmosphere and inventive sonics.

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Jóhannsson studied piano and trombone in childhood and began creating music in the late ’80s. Early endeavors included the band Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, whose abrasive indie style drew from the Jesus and Mary Chain and attracted admirers such as John Peel and Steve Albini. He became a central figure in Iceland’s indie community through his roles as guitarist and producer for groups including Unun. In 1999 he established the Kitchen Motors label and collective, whose participants also encompassed members of Sigur Rós, Múm, and Slowblow. That same year saw the launch of Apparat Organ Quartet, a quartet of keyboardists plus drummer whose two albums—2002’s self-titled release and 2010’s Pólýfónía—presented what the group termed “machine rock & roll.”

These cross-genre, collaborative undertakings shaped Jóhannsson’s solo path, which opened with 2002’s Englabörn. Drawn from music composed for a stage production, the wistful miniatures juxtaposed string quartet with percussion, keyboards, and electronics. The album prepared the ground for larger statements such as 2004’s Virðulegu Forsetar, an ambient work written for brass, organ, keyboards, and electronics and realized inside Reykjavik’s Hallgrimskirkja Church. On the following year’s Dis, Jóhannsson enlarged the cues written for the film of the same name and enlisted colleagues from Singapore Sling, Slowblow, Kitchen Motors’ Hilmar Jensson, and vocalist Ragnheidur Grondal, yielding a hybrid of Scandinavian indie and conventional scoring techniques.

Jóhannsson shifted to 4AD for two of his most expansive solo statements. The opening chapter of an intended trilogy exploring technology and emblematic American corporations, 2006’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual took its cue from the first computer imported to Iceland in 1964 and from reel-to-reel recordings of the machine’s electromagnetic signals captured by his father, one of the country’s earliest computer programmers. A string-quartet arrangement served as accompaniment to a dance work by choreographer Erna Omarsdórtir at the 2002 Dansem Festival. The recorded edition added vocalizing, electronics, and a 60-piece orchestra to the original IBM sounds. He followed it with 2008’s Fordlandia, whose expansive pieces drew on Henry Ford’s abandoned Brazilian rubber plantation and on engineer/occultist Jack Parsons. Commissioned works from this period encompassed music for the Icelandic television series Svartir Englar and the 2007 film In the Arms of My Enemy. The score for the animated feature Varmints was issued in limited tour-only form as And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees before receiving wider distribution the next year on Type Records.

Film and television scoring occupied most of Jóhannsson’s time throughout the 2010s. In 2011 his music for Bill Morrison’s documentary The Miner’s Hymns united electronics, brass band, and pipe organ. The next year he departed Apparat Organ Quartet and delivered Copenhagen Dreams, the soundtrack to Max Kestner’s documentary on the Danish capital. In 2013 he began his first partnership with Denis Villeneuve, scoring the director’s thriller Prisoners. Another tier of recognition arrived with the moving score for 2014’s Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, which earned a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. The following year brought a second Best Original Score Oscar nomination for Sicario, his second project with Villeneuve. He collaborated with the director once more on 2016’s Arrival.

Concurrently, Jóhannsson directed and scored the Antarctica documentary End of Summer, which also featured Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir and Lichens’ Robert A.A. Lowe. He premiered the contemporary oratorio Drone Mass at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015, performed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) and Roomful of Teeth. He rejoined Guðnadóttir for the BBC series Trapped, which received the Best Score prize at the 2016 Edda Awards in Iceland. That year he also joined Deutsche Grammophon for future solo releases. The first was Orphée, his initial solo studio album in six years. Drawing on multiple retellings of the Orpheus myth—including Jean Cocteau’s film—and on his relocation to Berlin, Orphée appeared in September 2016. Around the same period he began scoring Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel Blade Runner 2049, yet the director ultimately sought a different musical direction and brought in Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. Jóhannsson likewise composed a score for Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film Mother! that remained unused, though he received credit as music and sound consultant. Shortly after the February 2018 release of his score for James Marsh’s sailing drama The Mercy, Jóhannsson died in Berlin of heart failure at age 48. His final scores appeared later that year: Mary Magdalene, another collaboration with Guðnadóttir, arrived in March, while the music for Panos Cosmatos’ revenge film Mandy—recorded before his death and containing contributions from Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley and producer Randall Dunn—was completed by co-producers Pepijn Caudron and Yair Glotman for its September 2018 release. Also in 2018 the Jóhann Jóhannsson Foundation was established as a nonprofit linking music students with mentors, scholarship support, and educational programs.