THU., FEBRUARY 01, 2007
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Magazine Archives:
Between the Notes: Johann Johannsson
by Todd Burns
For music junkies, one of the worst — and sometimes best — developments of digital music is the lack of context. Without liner notes, it’s often hard to tell where, when, or even by whom a record was made. Sometimes it's actually nice not to know anything about the music, but every once in a while, a record comes along that demands illumination. That’s where we come in: each month, eMusic's Between the Notes will bring you the stories behind some of our favorite albums. This month: Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401 A User’s Manual.
Few people would ever dream of holding a funeral for a computer, but that’s exactly what Jóhann Jóhannsson’s father did in the late ‘60s for one of Iceland’s first mainframes, the IBM 1401 Data Processing System. Over its nearly seven years of operation, the men who worked on the machine had grown to love it. They also grew to find out that it could make music. By simply putting a radio receiver next to it, ghostly sine wave tones began to appear literally out of thin air.
At the computer’s funeral, Jóhannsson’s father helped record this music one final time on a reel-to-reel tape. Then he put the tape in the attic, and forgot about it. That is, until his son asked him to bring it out. The younger Jóhannsson was intrigued by the story — and soon began to construct a piece based on the computer’s melodies for a string quartet and Erna Ómarsdóttir, a dancer. The group toured throughout Europe, but when it came time to record the piece, Jóhannsson decided the quartet was simply not big enough. Enter the 60-piece City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The result, as Andy Battaglia notes in his eMusic review, is full of “power and patience.”
Recently, we spoke with Jóhannsson via e-mail about IBM 1401 A User’s Manual and its conceptual underpinnings.
eMusic: Tell me how you found out about the reel-to-reel tape your father had made of the IBM 1401.
Jóhann Jóhannsson: We were discussing my father’s old job at IBM over a family dinner and he happened to mention that he’d made music on this old computer in the ‘60s. He’d never mentioned this before, so he obviously didn’t think it was very important, but I was fascinated by the idea and I kept bugging him about it until I finally got him to locate the tape in our attic. Listening to the tape, I immediately knew there was material there for a piece, but it took about a year or so to figure out what I wanted to do with it. The catalyst was meeting Erna [Ómarsdóttir]. She kind of inspired the writing, although I’d had the idea of doing a piece based in this material for a while by then.
eMusic: How did you meet Erna?
JJ: We had run into each other a few times in the past. But we didn't really talk until we met by chance in Amsterdam. She told me about her dance and choreography work and there was something I liked and connected with, even though I had no prior knowledge of, or even interest in, contemporary dance. We spent a few days hanging out talking about doing a project together and when I told her the story of the IBM 1401, she really connected with the idea. Also, her father worked for IBM also, which was a nice coincidence.
eMusic: There is a voice on the second part of the piece, saying things like “put a drop of IBM 6 oil on the felt of the starting device every six months” and other strange instructions. Where did this voice come from?
JJ: Listening for the first time to my father’s old tape, I was pleased to notice that after the "funeral" recording finished, an antediluvian voice emerged through the tape hiss and flutter, like something out of a BBC documentary from the ‘50s, reading what sounded like obsolete technical jargon, punctuated intermittently by a bell. My father had evidently recorded the computer’s music and sounds over an audio instruction guide to the IBM 1403 Printer.
After listening for a while to this litany of long-forgotten technical terms and maintenance tips, they began to make sense to me in a strange way. The unknown instructor’s emotionless monotone began to resemble the voice of an oracle, a source of some ancient wisdom. The hypnotic droning of this voice and the ritualistic sounding of the bell (in actuality, probably used to signal a change of slide) began taking on the quality of some age-old prophet giving wise counsel. In old Iceland, wise poetic sayings attributed to Odin were collected under the name of Hávamál. They were to be used as a practical guide to life and survival in the Viking Age. It occurred to me that the user’s manuals that accompany all our machines and tools are in a way the Hávamál of the Information Age, guides to good relations between man and the machines with which we will share our future on this planet.
eMusic: You originally composed the piece strictly for performance with Erna’s dancing. What changed between the first version and the album?
JJ: I wrote the piece originally for a string quartet — mainly because that was the line-up I was most comfortable writing for at that moment. After I put it to tape, I felt it wasn't working as well as it could as a recording, and I decided the piece needed a bigger string sound. I also added Part V, which wasn’t originally in the piece. The piece needed an ending and I'd written this melody. I put it to a text by Dorothy Parker [the poem "Two Volume Novel"], a kind of lament, which I thought was really beautiful. The song was inspired by a particularly painful breakdown of a relationship I was in at the time.
eMusic: The idea of a "singing computer" reminds me a lot of Kubrick's 2001 — what were some of the influences were you drawing from when composing IBM 1401?
JJ: Visually and thematically, Kubrick’s 2001 was important, certainly. We had an album in the house when I was little, Music from Mathematics, it was composed of music made on a mainframe computer from the ‘60s from which Kubrick got the idea for the singing computer, so this is really stuff I grew up with. There’s a lot of Tarkovsky in there and Herzog as well. And more than a pinch of Lars Von Trier, particularly in the dance piece.
The story also hints at older myths such as Pinocchio and the Golem and Frankenstein. It's a search for substance in the artificial, a search for the soul of the machine. I think we're fascinated by this because it's not so different from the search for God, ultimately. It's about finding meaning and substance.
Few people would ever dream of holding a funeral for a computer, but that’s exactly what Jóhann Jóhannsson’s father did in the late ‘60s for one of Iceland’s first mainframes, the IBM 1401 Data Processing System. Over its nearly seven years of operation, the men who worked on the machine had grown to love it. They also grew to find out that it could make music. By simply putting a radio receiver next to it, ghostly sine wave tones began to appear literally out of thin air.
At the computer’s funeral, Jóhannsson’s father helped record this music one final time on a reel-to-reel tape. Then he put the tape in the attic, and forgot about it. That is, until his son asked him to bring it out. The younger Jóhannsson was intrigued by the story — and soon began to construct a piece based on the computer’s melodies for a string quartet and Erna Ómarsdóttir, a dancer. The group toured throughout Europe, but when it came time to record the piece, Jóhannsson decided the quartet was simply not big enough. Enter the 60-piece City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The result, as Andy Battaglia notes in his eMusic review, is full of “power and patience.”
Recently, we spoke with Jóhannsson via e-mail about IBM 1401 A User’s Manual and its conceptual underpinnings.
eMusic: Tell me how you found out about the reel-to-reel tape your father had made of the IBM 1401.
Jóhann Jóhannsson: We were discussing my father’s old job at IBM over a family dinner and he happened to mention that he’d made music on this old computer in the ‘60s. He’d never mentioned this before, so he obviously didn’t think it was very important, but I was fascinated by the idea and I kept bugging him about it until I finally got him to locate the tape in our attic. Listening to the tape, I immediately knew there was material there for a piece, but it took about a year or so to figure out what I wanted to do with it. The catalyst was meeting Erna [Ómarsdóttir]. She kind of inspired the writing, although I’d had the idea of doing a piece based in this material for a while by then.
eMusic: How did you meet Erna?
JJ: We had run into each other a few times in the past. But we didn't really talk until we met by chance in Amsterdam. She told me about her dance and choreography work and there was something I liked and connected with, even though I had no prior knowledge of, or even interest in, contemporary dance. We spent a few days hanging out talking about doing a project together and when I told her the story of the IBM 1401, she really connected with the idea. Also, her father worked for IBM also, which was a nice coincidence.
eMusic: There is a voice on the second part of the piece, saying things like “put a drop of IBM 6 oil on the felt of the starting device every six months” and other strange instructions. Where did this voice come from?
JJ: Listening for the first time to my father’s old tape, I was pleased to notice that after the "funeral" recording finished, an antediluvian voice emerged through the tape hiss and flutter, like something out of a BBC documentary from the ‘50s, reading what sounded like obsolete technical jargon, punctuated intermittently by a bell. My father had evidently recorded the computer’s music and sounds over an audio instruction guide to the IBM 1403 Printer.
After listening for a while to this litany of long-forgotten technical terms and maintenance tips, they began to make sense to me in a strange way. The unknown instructor’s emotionless monotone began to resemble the voice of an oracle, a source of some ancient wisdom. The hypnotic droning of this voice and the ritualistic sounding of the bell (in actuality, probably used to signal a change of slide) began taking on the quality of some age-old prophet giving wise counsel. In old Iceland, wise poetic sayings attributed to Odin were collected under the name of Hávamál. They were to be used as a practical guide to life and survival in the Viking Age. It occurred to me that the user’s manuals that accompany all our machines and tools are in a way the Hávamál of the Information Age, guides to good relations between man and the machines with which we will share our future on this planet.
eMusic: You originally composed the piece strictly for performance with Erna’s dancing. What changed between the first version and the album?
JJ: I wrote the piece originally for a string quartet — mainly because that was the line-up I was most comfortable writing for at that moment. After I put it to tape, I felt it wasn't working as well as it could as a recording, and I decided the piece needed a bigger string sound. I also added Part V, which wasn’t originally in the piece. The piece needed an ending and I'd written this melody. I put it to a text by Dorothy Parker [the poem "Two Volume Novel"], a kind of lament, which I thought was really beautiful. The song was inspired by a particularly painful breakdown of a relationship I was in at the time.
eMusic: The idea of a "singing computer" reminds me a lot of Kubrick's 2001 — what were some of the influences were you drawing from when composing IBM 1401?
JJ: Visually and thematically, Kubrick’s 2001 was important, certainly. We had an album in the house when I was little, Music from Mathematics, it was composed of music made on a mainframe computer from the ‘60s from which Kubrick got the idea for the singing computer, so this is really stuff I grew up with. There’s a lot of Tarkovsky in there and Herzog as well. And more than a pinch of Lars Von Trier, particularly in the dance piece.
The story also hints at older myths such as Pinocchio and the Golem and Frankenstein. It's a search for substance in the artificial, a search for the soul of the machine. I think we're fascinated by this because it's not so different from the search for God, ultimately. It's about finding meaning and substance.
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