Fordlândia
All Music Guide
The second installment in Jóhann Jóhannsson's trilogy of albums about technology and iconic American brand names, Fordlandia expands on IBM 1401, A User's Manual by chronicling, among other things, the failure of Henry Ford's Brazilian rubber plant with the power of a 50-piece string orchestra. IBM, which included recordings of its titular computer, could have been gimmicky or overly conceptual, but the results were remarkably moving and personal. While Fordlandia is slightly more straightforward musically, its concepts and emotional impact are much more involved and ambitious. Fittingly, ambition is one of the album's major themes, along with failure, mortality, immortality, and technology's potential for creation and destruction. Jóhannsson depicts these dualities with portraits of great heights and, mostly, deep losses. Ford's doomed project -- which he envisioned as a utopia but ended in disaster, with rioting workers and the development of synthetic rubber, ultimately costing him millions of dollars -- provides the thematic backbone for the album's major pieces. "Fordlandia"'s strings and subtle electric guitars are never less than majestic, but move gradually and naturally from hope to bittersweet doubt over the course of 13 minutes, keeping the intimacy that Jóhannsson's work has shown since Englaborn. That bittersweetness wells into sorrow on "Fordlandia -- Aerial View"; recorded in a Reykjavik church with no edits, its aching strings and low-rumbling percussion sound equally devastated and beautiful. Fordlandia also tells equally fascinating stories of creation and destruction that are less well known than Ford's: "The Rocket Builder (Lo Pan!)" takes its inspiration from self-taught chemist, rocket propulsion researcher, and occultist Jack Parsons, building from strings to precise electronics that overtake the track with a tense, slightly sinister beauty that deepens into dread thanks to doomy guitar chords. Its foil is "Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim's Quantum Theory)," inspired by German physicist Burkhard Heim, who, despite being blind, deaf, and having lost his hands in a World War II accident, devised a theory for space travel faster than the speed of light. Named after a research paper based on his work, the piece soars skyward on a looping pipe organ melody and streaming synths and strings, offering some hope among the rest of Fordlandia's gloom. "The Great God Pan is Dead" -- which alludes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems about the demigod who embodied creation and destruction for her -- crystallizes these dualities, as well as the album's profound sense of loss, with choral vocals and rain. Fordlandia's shorter pieces are nearly as heady and substantial as its major tracks: "Chimaerica"'s title blends the monster of Greek mythology with America, and its mournful pipe organ melody underscores the feeling that this album is a funeral service for the American dream. Variations on the "Melodia" theme tie the larger pieces together, appearing first as a clarinet-driven piece that evokes Ford's '20s heyday, then augmented with deep guitars inspired by Sunn 0)))'s work, and finally as a ghostly wash of strings and clarinets. Another 13-minute elegy, "How We Left Fordlandia," closes the album by uniting its concepts and musical themes in a somber but satisfying farewell. While knowing the inspiration behind the album reveals its depth, its music is more than powerful enough to be appreciated without the historical context that informs it. Beautiful, thoughtful, and sad on a grand scale, Fordlandia is nearly as ambitious as the stories it tells, but unlike its source material, it's another success for Jóhannsson. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
Reax Magazine
****
Arm hairs involuntarily shimmy as the 2:17 mark of the nearly 14-minute lead track from Fordlandia, Jóhann Jóhannsson's latest work, quickly passes. The opening piece builds from silence with a string arrangement that seems to stretch across the horizon - somewhat reminiscent of Brian Eno's Discreet Music album, but far more to the point than that meandering part-electronic, part-orchestral piece from the mid-'70s. As the track continues, effected guitars drift up through the concert of violins, violas and cellos much like a person toppling end over end through zero gravity; one has to applaud a tasteful touch of psychedelia in the often humorless world of neo-classical music. At once very much like, and different from, Gavin Bryar's Sinking of the Titanic, the parallels between the two albums are apt. Both are classical pieces whose inspiration was drawn from research and speculation about historical events, although the results on Fordlandia are more stylistically akin to Sigur Ros & Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson's Angels of the Universe soundtrack, which thrives on heavy, melancholic string arrangements and a lack of spacial sound references. The title is taken from a colonial town founded by Henry Ford in the jungles of the Amazon during the mid-1920s. Prohibition was but one of the many factors that brought about an implosion of that far-flung entrepreneurial effort, but what seems to have interested Johannsson is not the failed colonial effort, but rather nature's reclamation of lands seized by human endeavor. Given a little imagination, Jóhannsson and the 50-piece orchestra playing the Fordlandia pieces somehow manage to grandiosely conjure up imagery of the Amazonian ghost town slowly being overgrown by aggressive vegetation - a primitivist's dream if there ever was one. If a film hasn't been made about Fordlandia, Johann Johannsson's imaginary soundtrack all but demands that one begin production. - Lance Robson
Hear/Say
Rating: A
Review By Chris Drabick
A composer like Johan Johannsson could really only come from Iceland. The Land of Fire and Ice is caught between worlds; it’s not quite Europe and too far from the Americas. The land itself is young, serving as a reminder of the thin line between safe and secure lands and living on an active volcano. Johannsson is also caught between worlds; he’s not quite traditional classical composer, but not exactly post-rock. He’s been an active musician for many years, but is young in his career as a solo artist (beginning with the well-received Englabörn in 2002). Here, Johannsson continues in his proposed trilogy about the role of technology in modern life, preceded by 2006’s stunning IBM 1401- A User’s Manual. Taking as his inspiration Henry Ford’s failed attempt at building an Americanized rubber plantation in Brazil, Johannsson again reveals his singular vision of the intersection of modern and classical music.
As has been the case with all of Johannsson’s previous outings, Fordlandia is difficult to categorize. It’s nearly entirely instrumental (a female chorus emboldens the middle section of “The Great God Pan is Dead”), employing an array of stringed instruments that occasionally meet with out-of-time modern percussion and the stray pump organ of “Chimaerica.” Perhaps the easiest/laziest descriptive terminology could be to think of the bulk of Johannsson’s work as film soundtracks lacking a film, but the dismissive nature of that sort of classification misses the emotional impact of Fordlandia. Maestro Johannsson evokes the culture clash and class struggle of Ford’s folly, deftly navigating the space between worlds that must have typified the experiences of those that lived in Fordlandia. Only a musician like Johannsson could identify.
Spex (DE)
Als Autodidakt erlernt Jóhann Jóhansson bereits im jungen Alter das Handwerk der Komposition. Die flüchtigen Trends der Popmusik faszinieren ihn dabei ebenso sehr wie die traditionsreiche Eleganz der klassischen Musik – ein Gegensatz, der eine prominente Rolle in seinen elegischen Kompositionen einnimmt. Denn die Zusammenführung unterschiedlicher Elemente bildet den ästhetischen Kernpunkt seiner kompositorischen Arbeit. Eine solche Kreuzung verschiedener Materialien manifestiert sich beispielsweise in der Verwendung elektronisch generierter Klänge, die seine zarten Arrangements mit einem schimmernden Glanz verstärken, oder sie durch feine rhythmische Strukturen bestimmen. Trotz der Materialvielfalt und Experimentierfreude bleibt die Musik stets nachvollziehbar – Einfachheit und Klarheit dominieren die Partituren des Isländers.
In Jóhannssons eindringlichem Sound erkennt man den Einfluss namhafter Komponisten, wie zum Beispiel Zbigniew Preisner oder Arvo Pärt. Letzterer scheint eine starke Wirkung auf ihn auszuüben, die sich diesmal in der Beschäftigung mit der ›Alten Musik‹ offenbart, besonders der mittelalterlichen Mehrstimmigkeit – auf seinem neuesten Werk »Fordlândia« befinden sich drei kurze Klarinettenstücke, »melodia (i)«, »… (ii)« und »…(iv)«, deren eng verwobene Melodieführungen an die vokale Polyphonie jener Zeit erinnern. Elegant ist auch das auf Bach rekurrierende Orgelstück »Chimaerica« oder die Komposition »Fordlândia – Aerial View«, die von der melancholischen Intimität eines zarten Streicherarrangements geprägt ist.
Wie gewohnt unterlegt Jóhannsson auch diesmal seine musikalische Architektur mit einem narrativen Fundament. Erzählte sein vorhergehendes Album »IBM 1401, A User’s Manual« die Geschichte der ersten IBM-Computer, die 1964 nach Island importiert wurden, so bezieht sich »Fordlândia« zum einen auf Henry Fords gleichnamige Autoreifenfabrik im Amazonas und verweist gleichzeitig auf die Komposition »Finlandia« von Jean Sibelius. Beide Titel weisen nicht nur lautmalerisch eine enge Verbindung auf – vielmehr kann »Fordlândia« als die ironische Verkehrung des bereits bei Sibelius auftretenden Utopie-Gedankens verstanden werden. »Fordlândia« ist eine Dystopie, ein Experiment, das nicht geglückt ist. Die Dokumentation dieser traurigen Geschichte übernimmt die Musik.
Raphael Smarzoch
Gigwise.com
4/5
Jóhann Jóhannsson's elemental and naturalistic 'Englabörn' scored a best selling release for Touch Records, and 'IBM 1401 - A Users Manual' raised attention with the conceptual work in honour of his father's pioneering soundcraft. Jonny Greenwood, meanwhile, proved that ears could be bent to some neo-classical composition with his decidedly so-so score for 'There Will Be Blood', but Jóhann Jóhannsson belongs among the class of such luminaries as Max Richter, Ryan Teague, Craig Armstrong and Philip Glass. A native of Iceland, it's hard to divorce 'Fordlandia' from the natural landscape which springs readily to mind - stark and icy, it's a quality that Jóhannsson brings to these slow-building, emotive works, yet its' conception lies in the realm of ideas. The second of a proposed trilogy that included 'IBM 1401', Jóhannsson is inspired by the Victoriana of bygone days - a crippled German physicist who draws up equations to make travel faster than the speed of light possible, a Victorian poetess lamenting the death of Pan, an American magnate building a doomed utopia in the depths of the Brazilian rainforest, and a Pagan rocket scientist who blows himself up in his Californian garage.
Bookended by long, slow movements, 'Fordlandia' faces the hurdle of its' title track before we can listen without prejudice. Said track is a pastoral of swooping strings that harbours that magical geographical musicality that must come with living so close to the Arctic Circle. It serves as a tone-setter, and for the best part of the album the listening gets easier here-on-in. 'Melodia I' is the first of a series of running interludes where haunting clarinet loops and woodwind are joined by eddies of string section to cause ripples of tranquility, while 'Melodia II' adopts a lone clarinet to pitch a melancholic grace, and 'Melodia III' features solo piano and ambient strings to harbour an air of sadness.
'The Rocket Builder (lo Pan!) is a sombre-toned string-led movement conjoined by piano and minimal Craig Armstrong-esque beats, a movement more reminiscent of Max Richter's postcard scores as stirring strings build dramatic tensions with bloody, broody cello to underscore. 'Fordlandia - Aerial View' forms a contemplative lamentation from violins and cello, pregnant with imagistic qualities of leaf fall or ice-melt, a sense of falling away, aged and withery, while the Bach-like 'Chimaerica' makes good use of pipe organ, yet can't shake that sense of loss even as the drones become lighter and figurative.
'The Great God Pan Is Dead' has an operatic assistance from The City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus that strikes a cathedralesque grandeur, it's hard not to see it hovering in the rafters - Pan is dead, long live Pan. Meanwhile, get this for a title - 'Melodia (Guidelines For A Space Propulsion Device Based On Heim's Quantum Theory)' - building from previous Melodia's, this movement positively soars as the strings find an elixir, cadence and inspiration - energy is picked up with beats-lite crashing into a string orchestra climax, like Digitonal backed by a full orchestration. It's a fabulous contemporary and cinematic piece that rouses with a life-affirming vigor à la Craig Armstrong. Rounding off 'How We Left Fordlandia', it's even longer than the opener at 15 minutes odd, and whilst epical in scope, it's likely to test even the ardent listener with a movement less daring or immediate than what has occurred.
There's a strong sense of elevation that comes with these compositions that rouses the emotions like a cold shower on a summer's morn, by-golly. Seldom is the talk of such matters, so check Philip Glass's 'Floe' from Glassworks for a one-stop reference point. 'Fordlandia', however, is a more crystalline work that draws from the Victoriana of inventor's past, and shares man's inspiration in a dramatic form more stirring than Jóhannsson's predecessors.
Slant Magazine
****1/2
by Jesse Cataldo
or an album with no lyrics, Johann Johannsson's Fordlandia certainly has a lot of things to say. Narrative grandeur abounds: a Fitzcarraldo-like Brazilian jungle scene, a 19th-century poet mourning a fallen god, an unlucky rocket scientist, the mysterious work of a deformed German physicist. Lumped together, these ideas, expressed in the song titles and exhaustive track-by-track notes which Johannsson provides online, sound like the stuff of a Pynchon novel or a master's course, a full conceptual plate that would make the album intimidating if the music wasn't just as beautiful even without its ideas. Johannsson's songs are majestic in their simplicity.
Johannsson seems to realize that the themes he's developing, which center around failed utopias, are not necessary for the album to work and keeps them from being pounded into our heads, if that would even be possible considering his delicate style of icy Scandinavian ambiance. Fordlandia plays like a good soundtrack, not too hungry for our attention, quiet and unassuming, with sections that dip into a nearly ethereal softness. This is fitting, considering Johannsson's previous work in film scoring, and he's expertly created a tapestry that tightly links 11 tracks over more than an hour. The opening title track lasts nearly 14 minutes and, as Johannsson modestly mentions in the album notes, ends with a "5-minute long continuous ritardando, quite possibly the longest one ever committed to record—should anyone care!"
This is all played with an admirable earnestness that buoys even some of the album's borderline-cheesy material. Such moments are rare, however, and for the most part Fordlandia is sterling, the kind of album that allows you to tune out and absorb the entire thing passively. "The Great God Pan Is Dead" lingers on achingly slow female chants swathed in chilly synth waves, while "How We Left Fordlandia" lets its circling strings unspool for eight minutes before crashing to a crescendo halfway through. The idea of Fordlandia (a disastrous small-town America-inspired Brazilian colony created by Henry Ford, which Johannsson lingers on in his notes) as a giant symbolic broken dream is there, but you'd be hard pressed to find it if you weren't listening for it.
In this way, the ideas of Fordlandia remain frozen deep in the album's icy veneer, and while Johannsson is effusive in talking about them, he really wants us to discover them for ourselves, either accepting the album as a sensory experience or delving into its deeper sections on our own. In the end, the album is a fascinating musical thesis that can function with or without its brain intact.
Exclaim
By Eric Hill
Iceland is alive with the sound of string composers of late. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ólafur Arnalds and Amiina have all released lovely albums celebrating the pomp and melancholic circumstance of the North. Note for note though, Jóhann Jóhannsson manages to hover a few centimetres above them all. Fordlandia, his second release for 4AD, takes its title from a large tract of land in Brazil purchased by Henry Ford during the ’20s to harvest cheaper rubber. It was an experiment that was fraught with troubles. Jóhannsson turns his mastery of slow thematic evolution to the task of creating a musical backdrop that moves from bombast to subtle deflation. “The Rocket Builder” is another piece built on an insistent clockwork piano figure and a push of strings set against an electronic doppelganger of percussion. When these elements quietly trade spaces at the halfway mark the mood eerily turns from hopefully to worry-filled. Jóhannsson’s choice to examine themes of big dreams/bad outcomes feeds into our North American desire for the rags-to-riches-to-rags story retold. To have it presented without Oscar-fuelled mugging is a welcome relief. (4AD)
Aloud.com
Jóhann Jóhannsson is a true master of his craft. He is a composer from Iceland whose music has been featured in numerous theatre productions, documentaries, and feature films. His compositions, of which most lack lyrics completely, transition effortlessly, as the listener is led by the hand through each musical arrangement. Like Sigur Rós, Jóhann Jóhannsson also hails from Reykjavik, Iceland, and draws many similarities to that band, and likewise, the lyrical void in Jóhannsson’s music allows for him to rely more heavily on musical structure.
His new collection of songs is beautifully arranged and extremely moving. The soft crescendo of strings blends with the sublime piano in The Rocket Builder (Lo Pan!), the third song off this new album. The Great God Pan Is Dead is comprised of whimsical chants from a Prague-based choir, with spoken word excerpts from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - one of the few times voice is used in his music. Melodia (I) is a curious piece, as the sound of a solitary clarinet transforms into soft strings. How We Left Forlandia, a fifteen-minute composition, is the last song on the album and the perfect finale to his symphonic masterpiece, as violins and cellos play steadily until a musical apex is reached, before fading into a slower-tempo, then finally silence. Forlandia cements Johannsson's talent for showcasing each instrument in a different way, creating music that's both haunting and engaging.
Samantha Robinson
Drowned in Sound
by Guy Baillie-Grohman
You'd be forgiven for thinking that a set of three albums dedicated to exploring mankind's relationship with technology sounds a little excessive, even arrogant. However, 80+ minutes after hitting play on Jóhann Jóhannsson's second instalment of his trilogy, any erstwhile cynicism is swept away by this record's sheer sonic poise, juxtaposing moments of breathless delicacy with waves of bristling, visceral power.
Title track, 'Fordlândia' sets the precedent for the album's progression as soaring strings slowly rise above ricocheting electronic pulses, gracefully gliding the song into a melancholy head-spin. Indeed, it's the Icelandic composer's ability to seduce listeners into a complete musical dream world that separates Jóhannsson's remarkable talent from his closest contemporaries, notably Max Richter. This is certainly something Jóhannsson has built on since 2006's ambitious IBM 1401, A Users Manual, developing an increasingly organic fluidity in his compositions; an intricacy occasionally overlooked in the often rather taut, rigid structures of A Users Manual. Take 'The Great God Pan Is Dead' for example; whereas an Englabörn-era Jóhannsson would have been liable to cut short the repeated refrains of the haunting medieval chorus to make way for yet another idea, the Jóhannsson of today is happy to let his designs unravel at a less frantic pace – allowing the choir's stirring falsettos to gradually fade into the viola driven coda of 'Melodia (V)'.
Perhaps Jóhannsson's most commendable strength, though, is his ability to project an air of tactful restraint, ensuring ‘ Fordlândia remains just the right side of self-indulgent musical grandiosity. 'The Rocket Builder' illustrates this perfectly, with meandering piano swirls and intimidating string sections steadily building up only to cascade back down to earth again without ever achieving lift off, a subtlety a lesser composer would have overlooked in search of a more obvious conclusion.
If a fault is to be found with this record, it's indeed a most pedantic one: because despite Fordlândia being technically impeccable, emotionally hard-hitting and impressively original, Jóhannsson's previous dalliances in composing scores for Icelandic art-house cinema unfortunately shine through. Whilst this is certainly only a minor blemish, some areas of the record regrettably take on a distinctly soundtrack-esque atmosphere, with many themes being repeated once too many during the course of the album; leaving one wondering whether Jóhannsson would have perhaps been better off placing less emphasis on the theme of the record, and concentrating instead on ensuring his inspiring arrangements remained completely fresh to the very last chord of the album.
Still, this is a small price to pay for an LP that manages to pull off a seemingly impossible feat; an ambitiously themed, leftfield, modern classical album that not only impresses, but totally enthrals. An achievement well worth investigating. 8/10
MuiscOMH
****
"An American magnate builds a doomed utopia in the depths of the Brazilian rainforest. A Victorian poetess laments the death of Pan. A pagan rocket scientist blows himself up in his Californian garage. A crippled German physicist draws up the equations which can make faster than light travel possible, unseen by the rest of the world."
The above are all plotlines drawn together by Jóhann Jóhannsson in the making of Fordlândia. The Icelandic composer has already made many friends in response to such storylines, with his ability to take instrumental music to a transcendental state. Few outright demands are made on the listener, other than to unwind, allowing the music to become a luminous sonic background, or to focus on it and appreciate its craftsmanship.
In today's society the ability to rest the troubled mind must not be undervalued, though there is on closer inspection so much more to admire in Jóhannsson's method. Fordlândia is conceived on a large scale within classical structures, the tracks effectively sections of a larger work as they interlink themes and textures.
The orchestration is subtle but beautiful. When building layers of strings Jóhannsson is always careful not to overdo the slush, keeping the textures clean yet the music emotive. This means that when a track begins in near-complete silence, such as the very opening, the listener can expect to hear a gradual change of intensity that sweeps all before it over the ensuing seven or eight minutes.
As it happens the title track leads nicely into the first of four sections entitled Melodia, where Jóhannsson exploits a range of colours afforded to him by the clarinets, here with a plangent melody. Elsewhere his use of electronics is incredibly assured, the drum beats more implied than realised, while amplification is given to the piano parts that adds an edge to the timbre without dominating too much.
There are two particular masterstrokes achieved by Jóhannsson in Fordlândia. One is the incorporation of what sounds like a far off Bach Chorale Prelude in Chimaerica; the other an eye-opening arrival of the treble chorus in The Great God Pan Is Dead, a real moment of transparency.
This is the sort of music you might expect to accompany a documentary on the Arctic on the BBC. That's not to cheapen its value, rather to emphasise just how descriptive and moving it is. And with Jóhannsson's surety of touch, Fordlândia becomes a wonderfully intense piece of work.
- Ben Hogwood
outsideleft.com
I am sitting in the former Senate chamber of the former Louisiana State Capitol building, awaiting the next step of jury duty to begin. The Old State Capitol is a recently restored Gothic castle on the lower Mississippi, once famously maligned in print by Mark Twain who called for its destruction due to sheer hubris. Fires and typical Louisiana boondoggles and the natural degradation of grand and beautiful things in hot climates nearly honored our National Satirist's wish, but a proud restoration plaque bearing the name Bobby Jindal, a whip-smart young Governor of Indian descent, former exorcist and plausible Republican challenger to Obama in 2012, welcomes me to its vault of polished wood and stained glass, conscious that the spectre of arch populist Huey Long is watching, though he might bear Sean Penn's drowsy grimace, where I sit and wait to do my civic duty.
This a perfect setting in which to peck out a review of Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlândia, an elegant suite of lush string music straddling the austere and the populist. It swoons and swells like it is quietly bolstering for something spectacular to occur, much like my fellow citizens jockeying for aisle seats in this gracious hall, more a chapel than a reasonable place of business.
The back-story behind Fordlândia fits this complicated venue. Henry Ford sought to undermine the rubber cartels of Asia, so he carved out a rubber plantation in the jungles of Brazil. Countless things led to its spectacular failure: the eschewing of botanists in favor of engineers in the planning, staggering setup costs, and the development of synthetic rubber during the Second World War. None of these proved to be more lethal to the project than was Ford's own need to solve a problem philosophically, and Nature's reliable resistance to philosophy.
As I type this, Jóhannsson's slow organ and winds and strings endlessly unfold and refold like the flag atop this building, limply signifying America in the weak breeze. The setting, the music and the congregated duty-pressed strangers has me sat in the closest thing to church in decades.
Ford built Fordlândia as a perfect slice of apple pie out in the jungle: white picket fences, strict Prohibition, 9-to-5 ethical dignity. They had Sousa marches and square dancing in the evenings. The imported engineers braved malaria for this endeavor gladly - you can swallow any man's ideology when a fat pension is at the other end - but the locals revolted. They, like any reasonable people, preferred to toil in the less taxing crepuscular hours, and to drink away the evenings. Jóhannsson's sad orchestra soars over Ford's doomed utopia like a reconnaissance glider, bearing witness to another inevitable replaying of man's folly. The jury coordinator has arrived, offering up the conditions by which we can opt of the proceedings through a tinny microphone. I just heard the first of many "I don't pay taxes for this" that will be voiced throughout the week.
Incompatible with Ford's scripted Americana, the native workers set up an island of bars and brothels upstream, luring the transplanted Industrialists to discreet Third World charms. The rubber trees proved to be just as unwilling to play the game, wilting in tight rows of shoddy soil. Unbeknown to Ford's planners, natives need prostitutes and rubber trees need to grow scattered throughout the jungle. I recognize someone in line trying to get out of jury duty because a nephew being named for him is due to be born this morning. His success in this is as likely as Ford's was in Brazil. Jóhannsson's strings are being undercut by a crying baby brought against its will into this event, while the jury coordinator cheerfully bounces it on her hip.
Never underestimate the resilience of a good plan; my friend waves his release form at me as he darts off to the hospital. The woman in front of me bookmarks her copy of The Audacity of Hope as the instructional film started. The glare from the church-like windows renders the film nearly invisible from my seat. We are told about lunch breaks, our $12/day compensation and the general judicial process. Pens are passed out, and we are informed by the video judge that we should use these pens to aid our recollection of the facts presented during the trial. "The trial is being held in search of the truth," explains the narrator.
The truth I seek is generally a looser one than that of the process in which I am engaged, but then the stakes are more real here. Jóhannsson's velveteen sadness gives the mundane process of paperwork a marked gravity. His string techniques resemble the stretched jangle of his fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós and the protracted melancholy found in the similar work by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt; layers of unabashed emotional gauze overlap until the hues become deep as blood, boundless as a dramatic cloud- choked sky. I can imagine a defendant either being set free or hauled off to jail to this music. I can see Ford's hired thugs beating the workers into submission as clapboard houses, Main Street in exile, burn to the barren ground. The higher goal of narrative art is to hover at the optimum height, one where you can see the action on the surface as well as the way the landscape becomes the horizon. In this process, this music, this place, these things converge.
We are released to wait at the library across the courtyard. As with most situations in Louisiana, the servants running the show are adorable and sweet and the served are mealy and atrocious. One introduces herself as "Miss Bobbie" and says that there is a homeless woman that frequents the library that likes to dismiss jurors, so if we don't hear it from Miss Bobbie, we are to stay put.
I love Miss Bobbie and her cheery dedication. The ring on her iPhone is a church hymn. I love that homeless woman, and hope she appears to disrupt the wheels of justice. I love those drunken, whoring natives in Brazil and even old Henry Ford, a little. In mechanizing one's philosophy and greed, the two required ingredients of true hubris, the richness of humanity still rumbles through, wrecking one thing while setting another right. And most of all, I love the way art can soar above it all, the way a stained glass castle will eventually outlive the protests of our greatest cranks, the way history cycles churns through wars and lives and all people great and small, ground everything up to convey just a little context for anyone who might be listening, the way some simple sustained tones working in concert can embody the whole of the world. It is for these things I patiently wait for my opportunity to serve. Alex V. Cook
The Silent Ballet
Score: 8.5/10
Johann Johannsson has been making music for many years, during which time he has become an indispensable part of the Reykjavik music scene. Johannsson's resume is diverse, as he is not only a co-leader of the Kitchen Motors stable, but also a singer, a soundtrack artist and a member of Apparat Motor Quartet. His solo work (with the exception of Dis) has been marked by a stately grace, utilizing the efforts of orchestras, occasional solo artists and, on his last album, a dying computer.
Fordlandia combines the best of Johannsson's three orchestral albums. Echoes of Englaborn are found in the eight concise tracks, topping out with the choral excesses of "The Great God Pan is Dead." The other three tracks are long and languid, a la Virthulega Foresetar, but much less minimal. Last year's elegiac IBM 1401: A User's Manual made stunning use of a 60-piece orchestra, favoring the organic over the electronic; on Fordlandia, Johannsson delves even further into the realm of modern classical.
Six years ago, when Johannsson was asked to compose the soundtrack to Englaborn (an Icelandic play), he chose to balance the rough hewn edges of the script with sonic tenderness. This tone has continued through subsequent recordings, and has slowly become the Johannsson "sound," as bittersweet as a retired Viking drinking mead in a converted brothel. While listening to Fordlandia, one may encounter unbidden tears, or encounter lofty thoughts of fields and fjords.
Young countrymate 'Olafur Arnalds rides the same carousel. While the vocoder of Arnald's Variations of Static seemed an obvious nod to IBM 1401, the occasional piano on Fordlandia seems a shout-out to Eulogy for Evolution. Each artist is stingy with percussion, preferring to program beats only to punctuate later tracks. Each prefers the movement to the standalone statement. Despite the difference in age, each artist taps into a mourning for things gone by, and manages to capture the simultaneous sadness and yearning that is found in funeral music. This is never more obvious than in the organ tones of Johannsson's "Chimaerica," but it is present throughout Fordlandia's soarings and swoons.
Listening to Fordlandia is a majestic, all-enveloping experience. The mostly-wordless suite, which includes both overture and finale, is meant to tell a story, but is better enjoyed without an imposed narrative. The album's contemplative nature lends itself well to introspection. By the time the symphony ends, with the slowly receding notes of "How We Left Fordlandia," listeners may feel as if they have been transported in time, either backwards in memory or forward in imagination.
It's been a long time coming, but Johann Johannsson has finally produced his masterpiece. Previous releases have bordered on brilliance, but the cross-stitching of Fordlandia creates an end result greater than the sum of its parts. In the field of modern composition, you'll be hard-pressed to find a finer album this year.
-Richard Allen
Boomkat
Delivering a second long-form release for 4AD, Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson continues with a second part of his proposed trilogy of albums themed around iconic American brands. After IBM 1401 - A User's Manual, Johannsson turns his attentions to Fordlandia, named after the expanse of land purchased by Henry Ford in the Brazillian rainforest - a failed settlement designed as a means for acquiring rubber in the 1920s. As it turns out, this is only one amongst a number of overlapping themes drawn from various obscure corners of modern history, all knitted together like something from Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. The album is divided into a number of different threads, with themes recurring throughout - much as has been the case in Johannsson's previous works. Here, between the grandeur and cinematic majesty of the Fordlandia-themed compositions you'll find the 'Melodia' series, taking on a more intimate, piano-driven and melancholy temperament. It's all beautifully produced, extracting the very strict, classical style of Johannsson's music from what might otherwise reach ECM-like levels of discipline. A good example of this is 'Chimaerica' which on the surface sounds like a pastiche of a Bach organ piece, dominated by dour ecclesiastical melodies until some digital intervention draws the sound design into the 21st century. In a similar fashion, 'The Great God Pan Is Dead' is shaped by beautiful choral arrangements and some extreme dynamic shifts - all very much within the realms of the conventional classical canon (Arvo Part being a clear influence) - when immediately after, 'Melodia (Guidelines For A Space Propulsion Device)' crunches into life with a very contemporary, backbeat-driven electronic sound. Fordlandia is tremendously beautiful and, of course, comes highly recommended.