Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Johann Johannsson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Icelander composer Johann Johannsson.
Last updated on November 10, 2024.
Brass bands are part of my upbringing. Brass band records were among the first records I listened to.
One very early influence was reading about John Cage's experience in an anechoic room where the only sound you are left with is the high-pitched drone of your nervous system.
I like the whole Pacific Northwest.
I try not to obfuscate or to be to obscure or to be too cerebral. I like to work on a visceral, emotional level.
'Orphee' is, for me, about changes: about moving to a new city, leaving behind an old life in Copenhagen, and building a new one in Berlin - about the death of old relationships and the birth of new ones.
When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.
Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.
Silence can be very effective, and it gives the music space to breathe.
The idea that things should last just doesn't fit the economic model anymore.
I'm far from casual. I'm a huge fan of 'Blade Runner.'
I had three older sisters whose record collections I borrowed, so I was listening to The Velvet Underground as well as Bach and brass band music.
I think melancholy is kind of a misunderstood emotion. I don't think it's necessarily an unpleasant or bad emotion.
I've never been very good at creating absolute music, which has no non-musical dimension to it. I think that is why filmmakers gravitated toward my work.
I always do very detailed demos. I feel that it's better to show the director a demo that sounds as close to the final thing as possible with samples. It takes time to create, but I feel that it's better to get the director on board very early on in terms of the sounds that I have in my head.
There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.
I'm interested in extremes, in many ways.
'End of Summer' expands the way I want to express myself as a composer. It's a piece of visual music that has this narrative and conceptual dimension to it.
I think it took me until - my twenties were really a time of exploration and experimentation with different groups and different types of music. Then I kind of developed the sound, which first appeared, I guess, on my first solo album 'Englaborn,' which came out in 2001.
I don't want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.
I don't watch TV that much, but I like to get series on DVD and watch them all back-to-back.
I'm fascinated by the ruins and remains of industrialisation.
I think there's very little interesting in art that is not transgressive in some way. And I don't think that's a very revolutionary thing to say.
I believe that things can be expressed very powerfully through simplicity.
I tend to spend quite a lot of time on the film scores that I do.
I think that the essence of being an artist is to break rules. You have to learn rules, and you have to break them, because if you make art only by the rules, then you make very boring art.
I have a Yamaha YC-45D organ in my studio. It's actually Terry Riley's favorite keyboard, so if you find old clips of him on YouTube, he's usually playing one of these.
In this post-industrial society, when we're moving away from what was the norm, we have to deal with what it has left in its wake in terms of the impact on people and the environment.
Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That's one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?
I think my music is a way of communicating very directly with people and with people's emotions. I try to make music that doesn't need layers of complexity or obfuscation to speak to people.
I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound.
When I write music for a film, I'm not writing a solo album, and I'm not writing a personal piece. I'm part of a team of artists. So I think like a filmmaker more than a composer.
I think I have a sound or a certain feel in certain harmonies in the way I construct melodies.
I've been sort of playing music since I was probably 8 years old or something like that.
That's one of the hardest parts of putting together an album - finding that concept, that unifying idea. Especially as I write mostly in instrumental music, the idea of having a central concept that unifies the music is very important to me.
I like to have space between the notes. I like to use silence.
I'm a huge fan of Philip K. Dick.
I am a trombone player, and that was my first instrument.
Very early on, I started improvising. I was more interested in the music that came out of me than any music I heard.
I love old industrial imagery and smokestacks belching pollution, maybe because Iceland doesn't have any industry, just mountains and beautiful nature.
Sometimes you write music to a script or while a film is being edited. Sometimes I write without seeing any images, but that's rare. The approach is often based on practical decisions, but I'm interested in the narrative and physical space that music can occupy in a film or play.
I don't really take vacations.
There's very little synthesized sound in the 'Arrival' score. There are a couple of synthesized beats in there, but 99 percent of the sounds in there are acoustic in origin and either played or sung by a musician or a singer and recorded in a room.
To be honest, I don't particularly see myself as an Icelandic artist. I'm a European artist.
When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.
I love 'Treasure.' It's one of my favourite albums.
Pan Sonic sound like they are playing music of the future made with the electric instruments of yesterday.
Public speaking is something I fear more than death itself.
Even when I was studying piano, I always preferred to play around with my own improvisations rather than do my studies. So I've always been interested in writing music from a very early age.
The kind of industrial wasteland that you see in so much of Europe has a tremendous poignancy to me, especially when it's run down and you see the collapse and failure of this system. And also how nature reclaims it.
Melancholy is a state that I very much enjoy being in, actually. It's not the same as feeling sad. It's a more complex emotion; it derives from a tragic view of the world, a tragic view of art.
A lot of my music tends to combine electronics and orchestra.
Brass has a very distinctive sound. It's delicate but powerful, but it's also melancholic and plaintive.
Music has to be treated in the same way as set design, casting, or choice of location - it has to start at the same time.
For me, 'Blade Runner' is one of the big influences in my life - I saw it when I was 13 or 14, when it first came out, and since, I've seen it many, many times.
In my solo work on my own albums, I have used voice synthesizers and vocoders quite a lot in connection with orchestral instruments.
Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.
Always really good audiences in Belgium.
I'm very interested in voice synthesis and vocoders in general.
Making 'Orphee' has been a true labour of love, one that has been a part of my life for six years, and yet the music always remained fresh - it was constantly in a state of flux and renewal.
It's very common in Iceland, this music-making and artistic expression by non-professionals. The brass band tradition is not as big, but there are choirs everywhere. So that's something that is familiar to me.
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