At his best, Jóhann Jóhannsson displays patience and deploys silence the way traditional composers employ melody and dissonance. While the Icelandic composer's IBM 1401: A User's Manual-- a 2006 concept album about one of the earliest computers to arrive in his country-- was a distinct step down from his best work, it was a compelling narrative that fully complemented his stylistic choices: slow crescendos, voices reciting instruction manuals, and lingering digital noise. The second installment of a planned trilogy introduced by IBM, Fordlândia shifts Jóhannsson's technological narrative to more abstract sources: Henry Ford's failed procurement of rubber in the Amazon, a Victorian priestess and the death of Pan, and lamentably misguided scientists.
Musically, Fordlândia will sound familiar to Jóhannsson fans-- it's full of gorgeously sweeping strings aided by gently babbling electronics. If nothing in that description immediately brings to mind an automobile magnate haphazardly erecting an American-ized village for Brazilian rubber farmers, you're not alone. Jóhannsson is accustomed to collaborating with visual artists-- he has scored more than a half-dozen film soundtracks and IBM was originally intended to accompany a dance performance. Standing alone, Fordlândia-- recorded partially with the same Prague orchestra that performed IBM-- compensates by being the most traditionally dramatic of Jóhannsson's works.
The nearly 14-minute title track opens the album with a minute of near-silence, but from there the composer's heartstring symphony starts tugging hard. The sky-blue splendor of the major-key mix recalls, to cite a geographically obvious example, the wordless thrum of fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós. "The Rocket Builder (Io Pan!)", ostensibly about a pagan scientist from California who blows himself up, is tenser and more paranoid. Small string ripples interrupt a minor-key piano melody; electronic percussion titters in the background.
Elsewhere, on "The Great God Pan Is Dead" a muted choir sings wide syllables over an unobtrusive string accompaniment. Their utterances, shapeless at first, coalesce into the words "Pan Is Dead" by the track's end, lending the piece a soft mysticism. "Chimaerica" hovers around a lonely organ, providing both a sense of the gothic and one of Fordlândia's moments of true restraint. "How We Left Fordlândia" returns to Jóhansson's bread and butter, pounding out 15 minutes of spectral beauty and un-teasing melody. "How We Left Fordlândia" uncoils slower than either the title track or "Fordlândia-- Aerial View", serving as end-credits for an album on which almost every song could soundtrack a finale or a fadeout.
As comfortable as Jóhannsson is working with his orchestra, Fordlândia's wisest moments are its smallest: the embers of "Chimaerica", the swamp-reeds of the interspersed "Melodia" pieces. By comparison, the "Fordlândia" trilogy is simultaneously skillful, gorgeous, and a bit too polished-- they're a pristine composition on a record full of them, but it doesn't gel with the messy, self-destructive historical footnotes that inspired them.
