As the UK finds itself in significant trade union unrest, the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s debut album for Fat Cat Records seems timely. Collaborating with the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, The Miners’ Hymns project marries footage of Durham’s coal-mining culture with Jóhannsson’s transcendental soundtrack. ‘We spent some time in the North East of England,’ explains Jóhannsson, ‘Bill doing research in film archives and me working with local musicians’.
It is all too easy to bring up the Nordic cliché when talking about Icelandic music. Yet a Nordic idea is often pushed by these artists, most apparently with the post-rockers Sigur Rós whose frozen soundscapes have won them a mainstream love. The same thread seems to run through the grandiose panoramas that Jóhannsson constantly visits. He acknowledges his share in this Icelandic aesthetic: ‘We were all a part of a very vibrant scene around the turn of the millennium in Reykjavik’.
Yet Jóhannsson has always displayed a significantly philosophical bent. His electro-acoustic explorations have long been concerned with our relationship with technology. ‘I guess there is an implied critique of technology in some of my work’ Jóhannsson concedes. On 2006’s IBM 1401: A User’s Manual he used reel tape recordings of a 1960’s IBM mainframe, playing with the idea of obsolete technology. ‘When my father worked for IBM in the 60’s, there was an understanding that the job was there for life,’ muses Jóhannsson. ‘Now the focus is on growth and consumption, with little regard to the cost in natural resources or workers’ conditions’.
For Jóhannsson, the acoustic is everything. The Miners’ Hymns was originally presented in a live performance at Durham Cathedral. This acoustic manipulation is constantly brought to its extreme. ‘For me the space is as important a part of the sound as the instrument and the performer, so the building becomes a kind of giant resonating box, an instrument in itself’.
Morrison’s film culminates in the Miners’ Gala procession. ‘I recorded the piece with members of the NASUWT Riverside band, which was originally a colliery brass band.’ It is the music of the brass bands, their hymns in particular, which has so influenced Jóhannsson. ‘I knew I had found the way to approach this project when I heard ‘Gresford’, which is a beautiful wordless hymn written by a miner to commemorate the victims of a tragic mining disaster in the 30’s’.
Jóhannsson seems firm, ‘I don’t like to repeat myself’. And yet he reflects, ‘there are certain obsessions that I seem to keep going back to’.
