Jóhann Jóhannsson

Best remembered for his soundtrack to the hit movie 'The Theory of Everything', Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson melded orchestral, electronic and organic sounds into eerily graceful soundscapes and was highly regarded as an important, post-classical, experimental composer. Born in Reykjavik, he started out on the piano at the ag of eleven and by his university days he was making dreamy music with Daisy Hill Puppy Farm and later playing guitar in raucous, DIY rock outfits HAM and Unun. He also worked as a studio musician and landed his first big break when he produced Marc Almond's album 'Stranger Things' in 2001 before crafting his own brand of niche, minimalist ambience on early solo albums 'Englaborn' and 'Viroulegu Foresetar'. His reputation really began to build when he remembered his father's job as a maintenance engineer for the first widely available main frame computers in the 1970s, and crafted the elegiac ode to defunct technology on 'IBM 1401, A User's Manual'. Released in 2006 on the 4AD label, Jóhannsson used vintage sounds made on the primitive computers alongside classical piano motifs, swelling atmospherics and directions robotically read from the old instruction guide, creating a piece of work which was surprisingly majestic and cinematic. The themes of melancholic loss and stark, industrial fragility continued on 'Fortlandia' in 2008, which was inspired by Henry Ford's failed to attempt to found a rubber plantation and utopian town in the middle of the Amazon in the 1920s, and 'The Miners' Hymns' in 2011 which was the soundtrack to an archive documentary film about the decline of coal mining communities in the North East of England. He also made sprawling, post-punk, Krautrock noise music with his band Apparat Organ Quartet and created scores for feature films 'McCanick' and 'Prisoners', before working on director James Marsh's biographical love story of physicist Stephen Hawking 'The Theory of Everything'. The epic, swelling, stargazing drama of Jóhannsson's score became a key element of the hit film and won him a Golden Globe Award in 2015. He went on to create music for sci-fi movie 'Arrival' and thriller 'Mandy' and completed his final solo album 'Orphee'. He was due to start work on his biggest project to date - creating the soundtrack for the Disney movie 'Christopher Robin' - at the time of his death in his Berlin apartment in 2018, aged 48.

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