IBM 1401, A User's Manual

The IBM 1401 arrived in Iceland in 1964 and was retired in 1971. Jóhann Gunnarsson, its maintenance engineer, recalled that an American programmer who was also a musician had written a program to make it play melodies, and that its farewell tape was made in 1971 by picking up the machine's electromagnetic emissions with a radio receiver. His son built the album around that tape. The melody the computer plays is the hymn Ísland ögrum skorið by Sigvaldi Kaldalóns, Parts 2 and 3 use the voice of an unknown instructor from an IBM maintenance tape found in his father's attic, and every electronic sound comes from the IBM 1401 or a Hammond B3 run through ring modulator, distortion and filter pedals.

The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra recorded the strings in Prague in September 2005. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson gave it 6.9, praising a beautiful start and a powerful finish but finding a long sag in the middle, while musicOMH gave it five stars and Slant four and a half. It was pressed on vinyl for the first time in December 2017.