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Avg: 4.5 (80 ratings)
- Date Released: October 24, 2006
- Genre: Electronic
- Style: Orchestral
- Label: 4AD
Icelandic composer pays tribute to his father’s computer
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We Say...
The main takeaway effect of IBM 1401, an ambitious album with a significant, even moving, conceptual underpinning, gets signaled by an opening track that doesn't actually acknowledge the concept. “Part I” is bright and grand and almost impossibly stirring — an emotional plea by a 60-piece orchestra to listen in past the process. Then the process wanders to the fore: In “Part II,” a mundane voice intones over more strings, reading from the maintenance manual for an old computer; the miracle is Johansson uncovers a surprising poignancy in phrases like “the pins of the coils must be properly latched… To fix them more securely, use cellulose glue.”
Johannsson, an Icelandic artist and composer, based parts of the piece on music that his father, the maintenance engineer for the first mainframe computer brought to Iceland, created using the IBM 1401. The relationship between man and machine, technological nostalgia and a tender father-son connection all come into play, but the piece is inspiring regardless of its back-story. The five parts all flow, taking quiet but anxious strolls through an orchestral score angled toward the gently slipping melodies of Brian Eno. Electronic sounds figure on occasion, but Johannsson’s power and patience are what stand as most novel.
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| 01. |  |
Part I |
8:32 |
|
| 02. | |
Part II |
9:32 |
|
| 03. | |
Part III |
10:23 |
|
| 04. | |
Part IV |
7:15 |
|
| 05. | |
Part V |
7:08 |
|
05 Total Tracks, 42:50 Total Length
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