The first bit of music I heard from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was "Odi et Amo" from his 2002 album Englabörn. The song opens with a string quartet weaving a terribly sad and romantic little platform, and standing on top is an operatic tenor run through a vocoder, voicing a poem by Catullus, sounding for all the world like a heartsick cyborg mourning the loss of power to the circuits of his beloved. Right away, Jóhannsson was presented as a composer with interesting ideas about technology and music, ideas about the sorts of feelings that might be evoked through juxtaposing electronics with history-rich references like a string quartet and an ancient poem.
On his first album for 4AD, Jóhannsson takes the ache of nostalgia for obsolete technology and inflates the melodrama to airship proportions. IBM 1401 - A User's Manual comes with a compelling back-story. Jóhannsson's father worked at IBM as a maintenance engineer for the 1401 Data Processing System, an early and popular business computer that arrived in Iceland in 1964. At that time, keeping a computer up and running involved knowledge of machinery as much as electronics; you needed to understand how ball bearings worked and know where to pour the motor oil. His father was also a musician, and he figured out a way to program the machine's memory so it emitted electromagnetic waves in a pattern that could be picked up by a radio receiver. The IBM 1401 was taken out of service in 1971, and his father gave it a farewell ceremony that included playing some of the short melodies he had composed. These tracks were recorded.
You can see where this is going. Jóhannsson found the tapes and began to write an elegy of sorts for the 1401, using some of his father's pieces as a starting point. It developed into a dance work created in collaboration with choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir and has now been expanded into an album, complete with full orchestra. Among Jóhannsson's music that's found its way stateside, this is the most dramatic and sweeping by some margin. Gushing, cinematic strings rise and fall next to subtle electronic treatments, IBM instructional tapes on machine maintenance, and the occasional vocodered voice that hearkens back to "Odi et Amo".
The long fade into the opening "Part 1 - IBM 1401 Processing Unit", in which a crude electronic sound repeats the theme that will appear repeatedly throughout the piece, begins on precisely the right foot. The eight-note refrain drips with loss, the kind of sad tune would imagine for a mainframe about to be put out to pasture. And when the orchestra emerges and plays with the central pulse, which never wavers, Jóhannsson seems to be probing, poking at the refrain to see what else sort of feelings might be drawn out of it.
"Part 2 - IBM 1403 Printer" combines a dry recording of a voice giving instructions on the machine's maintenance over a minimal backing of bells and strings that builds in intensity as the piece goes on. There's something wonderfully Disneyfied about it, a vision of the future frozen in the 1960s accompanied by twinkling, sentimental orchestrations. Here, too, the contrast between the voice and the arrangements is enough to maintain interest.
"Part 3 - IBM 1402 Card Read-Punch" and " Part 4 - IBM 729 II Magnetic Tape Unit" however, are the album as its blusteriest, with huge swells that feel less earned and fail to resonate. "Part 5 - The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black" ends the record on a redemptive note, a robotic vocal intoning a hearbreaking little tune over a more muted backing, which then climbs to a vast climax that alternates wailing strings with the sound of malfunctioning machinery.
It's a powerful finish to a record that begins equally beautifully, but the long sag in the middle makes IBM 1401 - A User's Manual a bit harder to recommend overall. To ears conditioned by syrupy Hollywood film music, some of these orchestrations can sound over-egged, almost to the point of crass manipulation. They're pretty, no question about that, but that's not enough for a composer like Jóhannsson; the best moments come when the sweetness is heard in contrast, usually cut by a pang of longing engendered by the aching nostalgia of a future imagined in the recent past. Jóhannsson remains a fascinating composer, and the highs here can induce gooseflesh, but the record never quite gels into a coherent album-length statement.
