Flight from the City

Orphée opens with Jóhannsson at the piano and the ACME string quartet around him. Alex Burns hears the strings build slowly under the piano with electronic bell sounds, and PopMatters' Christopher Laird singled out its repeating, muscular piano riff. The piece is older than the album: he played it in a KEXP studio session with ACME that NPR posted in August 2010, six years before Orphée. A Closer Listen tied it to his own move away from Copenhagen, the change the whole album reflects. An edit of the track was released digitally in July 2016 ahead of the album.

The Irish artist and filmmaker Clare Langan directed, shot and edited its film in March 2015 in the old hot spring at Flúðir, the Secret Lagoon, working in black and white with an altered infrared camera. Tristan Gribbin and her daughter Leela appear in it. Langan told the Reykjavík Grapevine she had no crew and shot it handheld, that Jóhannsson gave no instructions and offered the film in exchange for use of his music, and that his only advice was to put her heart on the screen. It was their second film together after The Floating World (2013), it launched Orphée, and it has been shown at the Reykjavík International Film Festival and as a gallery piece.

Live and after

It was among the most played pieces of his Orphée tour, logged seven times on setlist.fm from Thalia Hall in Chicago in October 2016. Dustin O'Halloran has played it since Jóhannsson's death. Víkingur Ólafsson recorded a re-work for Deutsche Grammophon in 2020, and Alice Sara Ott made a solo piano transcription for her 2026 album Piano Works. The upload in the hypersongs web is Clare Langan's official video, posted by Deutsche Grammophon in July 2016.