CALMER CHAMELEON
Iceland’s Prince of Neo-Classical Chillout calms and goes, he calms and goes…
Every music festival needs its quiet oasis, and Johann Johannson is this year’s Olafur Arnalds, the fellow Icelander who last year spellbound an audience desperate for a little respite from the onslaught of guitars and pounding beats that tend to dominate these gatherings. Like Arnalds, Johannson is all about the space between the notes as much as the patterns they carve. His 2006 concept album, ‘IBM 1401 Users Manual’ (his debut for 4AD records), was something of a contemporary classical masterpiece, and while his early albums may have initially been awash in soothing electronica that Air fans really ought to have been buying, he’s more recently embraced the minimalist arrangements of Arvo Pärt or Michael Nyman. This has heightened the elegance of his early work, leaving him floating in a world of electronically enhanced chamber music.
BIG MAC AND BOW TIES
Of course you know you’re looking at a serious musician when a four piece string section takes centre stage, while Johannson and a colleague, seated behind a bank of keyboards and a Mac, flank them either side, and it’s the strings that open proceedings with a short prelude, Johannson then sending ripples of piano phrases over their surface. The only other sound comes from the audience, a collective sigh of relief at being able to extract their earplugs.
Johannson’s skill lies in his formidable reserve and his belief that a simple phrase, the tremors that the right notes can trigger, are more than enough to still an aching and weary heart. But he’s not afraid of dropping in distant percussive tics like echoing submarine bells, or letting a low bass note spread like melting wax while he traces out piano lines like Erik Satie. But then, just when you fear he might slip off into slumberland, he bangs out threatening octaves while the pitter of electric circuitry distorts beneath it all, unnerving, increasing, unsettling.
STRING US ALONG
But though he operates in soundtrack fields, Johannson is not writing this for the kind of Hollywood movie that he could so obviously score. That, presumably, inevitably, still lies ahead, and until then no one is going to tell him how to set a mood. This is not to say that he gets the balance right each and every minute of this serene half hour. At times he searches perhaps a little too hard for a sense of yearning that sees him drag his feet through sticky sweet avenues, but these are brief aberrations. For the most part there’s nothing excessive, no unnecessary embellishments, and consequently there’s nowhere we’d rather be. What makes this so wonderful is the realisation that, thanks to the lack of theatrics or even a significant lightshow, this place we’ve been is actually inside our own heads.
He ends with the final movement of ‘IBM 1401 Users Manual’, a computerised voice somehow out of place after the purity of what’s preceded it. But such is the emotional tug and pull of this final arrangement – a distant relevant of both Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ and Gorecki’s ‘Symphony Of Sorrow’ – that it does nothing to detract from the intensity of his sentiment. Big calm indeed…
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