Johann Johannsson
Icelandic composer who wrote the score for Theory of Everything
JOHANN JOHANNSSON, who has died aged 48, was an Icelandic composer known for blending electronics and classical orchestration, whose work included the haunting yet minimalist soundtracks for The Theory
of Everything (2014), and Denis Villeneuve’s thriller
Sicario (2015).
He won Oscar nominations for both films and bagged a Golden Globe for his work on James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic. But it was Sicario which got the critics talking. The disturbing atmosphere of the film, a thriller based on a Us-led effort to take out a major Mexican drug lord, was heightened by Johannsson’s screw-turning score, full of weird, jarring sounds, which ratcheted up the tension with an electronic bass wallow descending to seemingly impossible depths. “It’s a slow boil, and you’re in the water,” observed a reviewer.
“Writing, for me,” Johannsson told an interviewer, “is about turning off the intellect and letting the blood speak.”
Johann Johannsson was born on September 19 1969 and grew up in Reykjavik where his father, Johann Gunnarsson, was the chief maintenance engineer for the IBM 1401, the first mass-produced computer to arrive in Iceland. Johann began his musical career in the mid-1990s as a guitarist playing in Icelandic indie rock bands.
In 1999 he co-founded Kitchen Motors, a think tank, record label and multidisciplinary collective dedicated to the search “for new art forms and the breaking down of barriers between forms, genres and disciplines”. It was his experimentalism and playfulness, combined with a genius for tapping into primal human emotions, that distinguished his work. His first album,
Englaborn (2002), a suite originally written for a play by Havar Sigurjonsson, combined pulsing strings and insistent beats with an electronic voice intoning lines from Catullus.
He described his third album, Dís (2004), a score for Silja Hauksdóttir’s debut feature film which combined bubby electronic pop and delicate instrumentals, as capturing “the zeitgeist of early 21st-century Reykjavik”.
In 2006, he created an album, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual, around tapes that his father had made years earlier using the computer to generate electromagnetic sounds, adding swelling strings and analogue drones to the mix.
Among several cinema soundtracks, he collaborated with Denis Villeneuve on three films, the last being
Arrival (2016), for which he was again nominated for a Golden Globe and won a World Soundtrack Award for Best Film Composer.
His score for the film, about a linguist seeking to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors, included human voices and choral chanting altered to create strange, other-worldly effects. Johannsson’s next project,
Fordlandia (2008), was inspired by Henry Ford’s doomed utopian plantation project in the jungles of Brazil.
In Britain, The Miner’s
Hymns, a multimedia collaboration between Johannsson and the director Bill Morrison, featuring a 16-piece brass ensemble and Johansson’s own electronics, was premiered in Durham Cathedral in 2010 as a homage to the region’s coal-mining history.
As part of the 2017 Manchester International Festival, Johannsson presented the world premiere of Last and
First Men, a multimedia work featuring the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with electronically manipulated live soprano voices, based on the cult 1932 sci-fi novel by Olaf Stapledon.
His most recent commission, Garth Davis’s biblical drama, Mary
Magdalene, is due to be released later this year.
Johannsson was found dead in his apartment in Berlin. The cause of death was not disclosed.
He is survived by his parents, three sisters and a daughter.