Jóhann Jóhannsson

Reykjavík

Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson was born in Reykjavík on 19 September 1969. His father, Jóhann Gunnarsson, was a maintenance engineer at IBM, and his mother was Edda Thorkelsdóttir. He learned piano and trombone from the age of eleven but gave them up as a teenager, and later studied languages and literature at the University of Iceland. Deutsche Grammophon describes him as largely self-taught.

His first band, Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, started in a garage in the mid-1980s and made its first record in 1988. John Peel played its EPs, and the Guardian's Joe Muggs heard debts to the Jesus and Mary Chain and Joy Division. Through the 1990s he played guitar and produced for HAM, Olympia and Unun, had a brief flash of success with the synthpop band Lhooq around 1998, and wrote songs for his band Dip. Two Dip songs ended up on Marc Almond's Stranger Things (2001), which Jóhannsson produced and arranged, playing most of the instruments himself.

Kitchen Motors and IBM 1401

In 1999 he co-founded Kitchen Motors, a think tank, art organisation and label, and conceived the Apparat Organ Quartet for one of its concert series. Muggs likened the group to the Fall playing Kraftwerk on keyboards rescued from junkyards. Jóhannsson stayed until 2012, when solo work left him no time.

His first solo album, Englabörn (Touch, 2002), began as music for a play by Hávar Sigurjónsson, and Pitchfork gave it 8.9. Virðulegu Forsetar followed in 2004. Around 2002 a colleague of his father turned up a 1971 tape of the IBM 1401, the computer his father had looked after, playing music. Jóhannsson first scored it for string quartet to accompany a dance piece by the choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir, then rewrote it for a sixty-piece string orchestra and added a new final section. The result was IBM 1401, A User's Manual (4AD, 2006), whose closing part, The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black, came out first as a single. Muggs wrote that this was the record where it all came together.

Fordlândia (4AD, 2008) took Henry Ford's failed plantation town in Brazil as its subject, the second part of a planned trilogy on technology and industrial archaeology. And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees followed in 2009, the year of his New York debut at (Le) Poisson Rouge with the string quartet ACME. The Miners' Hymns, premiered in Durham Cathedral in July 2010, appeared on CD and DVD in 2011. In 2012 he toured with Dustin O'Halloran and Hauschka as the Transcendentalists, including a night at the Barbican.

Film

For Denis Villeneuve he scored Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016). The Theory of Everything (2014), for James Marsh, won him the Golden Globe for best original score along with Oscar, BAFTA and Grammy nominations, and Sicario brought a second Oscar nomination. Arrival made him film composer of the year at the World Soundtrack Awards. He did not score Blade Runner 2049, after Villeneuve decided he wanted a change in direction, and Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch wrote that music instead.

Orphée and after

In 2016 he signed exclusively to Deutsche Grammophon, and that September released Orphée, his first solo album in six years. Made in Copenhagen, Berlin and Reykjavík between 2009 and 2016, it drew on Ovid's and Cocteau's tellings of the Orpheus myth, on Cold War numbers stations and on his own move from Copenhagen to Berlin. Clare Langan's film for its opening track, Flight from the City, launched it. He toured the album from October 2016 to January 2018, from Chicago to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

His score for The Mercy came out about a week before he died at his apartment in Berlin on 9 February 2018, aged 48. Muggs called him a forerunner of the post-classical movement that made stars of musicians such as Nils Frahm, and described his subject as endings: closed mines, obsolete mainframe computers and failed utopias. Later that year his father played the Theory of Everything theme in Reykjavík on a modified street organ, driven by MIDI files his son had made. Posthumous releases have included Englabörn & Variations (2018), the film Last and First Men (2020), Drone Mass (2022), Alice Sara Ott's Piano Works (2026) and Friendship Survival Guide (2026), which Adam Wiltzie completed with the blessing of Jóhannsson's family.