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Album Review Memorable music from a master gone too soon

SIMON DUFF recommends a beguiling moving and personal musical dream from the award-winning Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson

Johann Johannsson
Drone Mass
Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

 

DESPITE its title Drone Mass is neither a setting of the Mass nor a piece that simply drones. Rather it is Johann Johannsson’s personal journey inspired by those two force fields. In essence an electroacoustic oratorio.

Science and technology were a key part in the life of the Icelandic composer. Even in his early work such as IBM 1401 A users Manual, his debut album for 4AD in 2006, he used words taken from an IBM computer manual.

Later came Hollywood success such as his score for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario in 2015. He won a Golden Globe in 2015 for his score to James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything and a year later his contributions to Villeneuve’s Arrival. His rejected score for the Ridley Scott-produced Blade Runner 2049 will surely be cleared for release at some point.

The previously unrecorded Drone Mass was written for voices, string quartet and electronics, commissioned and premiered by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, ACME, who toured and recorded with Johannsson for almost 10 years.

In collaboration with Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. The album is a richly mysterious accomplishment which at times bears comparison with the meditative minimalism of composers such as Arvo Part, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Henryk Gorecki.

Beginning with strings and voices, but slowly integrating Johannsson’s electronic techniques into its unique Iceland-inspired soundscape. Source material for the composition includes the so-called Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, discovered in Egypt in 1945. Among other texts, Johannsson uses a hymn described as consisting of “a seemingly meaningless series of vowels.”

The work’s 2015 premiere took place in the spectacular setting of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The album was recorded in May 2019 at the Garnisonskirken Church in Copenhagen. A highlight is the remarkable late movement Take the night air. A fusion of electronic and vocal sounds. All add up to give a feeling of weightless floating emotion.

Johannsson uses FX and processing as a kind of Higgs boson — the particle that gives mass to the other particles. By the middle of the movement the mood becomes heavy and massive so that when the voices enter with bursting melodic hook lines, it sounds like ghosts echoing in a darkened then floodlit cathedral.

While the score for the vocal parts is clearly defined Johannsson would often leave instrumental parts slightly open, especially when working with musicians like ACME, to whom he felt close.

Hillier and Theatre of Voices thrive in this playful experimentation. Johannsson died in Berlin on February 9 2018, aged 48, following what the coroner described an an accidental cocaine overdose. Tragically, young and with so much still to offer. Drone Mass is a beguiling moving and personal dream like tribute from some of those who knew him best in music.

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