2022 - Iceland
Mass, Modern Classical, Holy Minimalism, Drone, Post-Minimalism
The Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble worked together on this album for ten years, touring without ever recording it in a studio. Ten years is a mighty long time that enables to creativity to never settle down. That’s how Johannsson was living, never settling down, always taking risks with his music to bring modern classical forward. In February 2018, Johannsson died at the age of 48. This terrible loss leaves behind him many beautiful compositions (Flight From the City), a post-apocalyptic and experimental long-feature film called Last and First Men and many soundtracks, among them the sound of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Sicario and Prisoners. And now we finally have… this. “A contemporary oratorio” is how Johannsson liked to describe it, a musical composition between Arvo Pärt and Henryk Gorecki made for a choir of voices, a string quartet and those electronic sounds deeply loved by Johannsson. At the crossroads. He was a traveller, musically speaking at least. Someone who deepened his knowledge of the many forms music can take in order to create a lyrical drama, sometimes terrifying and other times uplifting, that was meant to bring together the sounds of the Earth and the many spaces articulating in it. Rossen’s You Belong There is to time what Drone Mass is to space.
If you listen to music by Icelandic artists like Björk, Sigur Ros, Sóley, Sin Fang or Amiina, you will instantly hear how important their birthplace is to them. And especially the landscapes. I went to Iceland once and what you find there is incomparable to anything else. Time unwinds differently. Every 10 kilometers you start thinking you’ve reach a new island, a new planet. The main sounds you’ll hear will be the sounds of nature, volcanos, sulphur, rocks, waves, glaciers. What you see, what you smell, what you touch, everything comes from the Earth and the Sea. It’s one of those places where you feel awake, and by that I mean sentient. You feel alone, humble, limited and profoundly moved. You are both terrified and in awe, and the only way to experience this is to go there. Or at least to listen to its music. There’s a place in Iceland with the fancy name Diamond Beach near the Jökulsarlon, one of the most famous glacier. Parts of the glacier detached and fall into the sea. Then the waves and the current bring some of those big rocks of ice to the shore, on the black sand. When you walk on this beach, you can admire the magnificent shapes of those sculptured rocks. But five minutes later, they’ve already disappeared and are now replaced by new ones. You can only hear the wind and the waves and feel you feet in the sand, and might come across the lonely vertebra of a mythical whale.
This is one of the space I’m talking about. But even more than one symbolic place reminiscent of the ephemeral aspect of our times spent on different places of Earth, Drone Mass embraces a much bigger point of view. On this album, a tumult of frequencies unleash in your body as if the Earth beneath your feet was shivering. In the beginning with One is True, the voices starts gently to caress your skin, while the string quartet does nothing more but lay emphasis on those emotions you’re about to experience. So when Johannsson’s soundscape evolves into something new on The Last Foul Wind I Ever Knew, you might feel scared or empowered, because of how deep this music sounds. And the meditative minimalism in which the voices and instruments are drenched in tells you there is nowhere else to go. It’s you and the music. Alongside modern composers like Max Richter, Peter Gregson and Philip Glass, Johannsson embraces post-minimalism in a very Romantic way, looking for stretched melodies only to bemuse us. I was mentioning the vertebra of a mythical whale, and Drone Mass exactly feels like a skeleton of air and water hidden somewhere in front of our faces, but that only appears to you with sounds. It’s the whirl of the Huldufolk, the hidden world of Iceland symbolizing their unique relationship with nature.
And then we haveMoral Vacuums. Never before has a drone and ambient music piece moved me this much. It’s the pinnacle of meshing together choir voices and a orchestra of strings, making it even hard to tell which one is which. They all make room for the strings of that lone violin acting like a driving force through the vastness of the world. If classical music gathers now influences from a lot of modern genres, Moral Vacuums definitely is one of those songs that has to become a standard bearer. And now we rest. The last two tracks of the 50-minute oratorio, Take the Night Air and The Mountain View, the Majesty of the Snow-Clad Peaks, From a Place of Contemplation and Reflection (yes this is the complete title) both act like an immense cloud enveloping us into a blurry yet familiar world. One is True to Divine Objects and Moral Vacuums enabled us to become a part of nature. We were the cascades, the ice, the wind in the grass and the boiling rocks. But now we go back to our human form, as an observer who experienced what is now spreading in front of our eyes. And what we see is the final soundscape of Johann Johannsson, between Renaissance polyphony, an Egyptian Coptic Gospel and many other obsessions that ACME and the Theatre of Voices managed to breathe life into.
If you listen to music by Icelandic artists like Björk, Sigur Ros, Sóley, Sin Fang or Amiina, you will instantly hear how important their birthplace is to them. And especially the landscapes. I went to Iceland once and what you find there is incomparable to anything else. Time unwinds differently. Every 10 kilometers you start thinking you’ve reach a new island, a new planet. The main sounds you’ll hear will be the sounds of nature, volcanos, sulphur, rocks, waves, glaciers. What you see, what you smell, what you touch, everything comes from the Earth and the Sea. It’s one of those places where you feel awake, and by that I mean sentient. You feel alone, humble, limited and profoundly moved. You are both terrified and in awe, and the only way to experience this is to go there. Or at least to listen to its music. There’s a place in Iceland with the fancy name Diamond Beach near the Jökulsarlon, one of the most famous glacier. Parts of the glacier detached and fall into the sea. Then the waves and the current bring some of those big rocks of ice to the shore, on the black sand. When you walk on this beach, you can admire the magnificent shapes of those sculptured rocks. But five minutes later, they’ve already disappeared and are now replaced by new ones. You can only hear the wind and the waves and feel you feet in the sand, and might come across the lonely vertebra of a mythical whale.
This is one of the space I’m talking about. But even more than one symbolic place reminiscent of the ephemeral aspect of our times spent on different places of Earth, Drone Mass embraces a much bigger point of view. On this album, a tumult of frequencies unleash in your body as if the Earth beneath your feet was shivering. In the beginning with One is True, the voices starts gently to caress your skin, while the string quartet does nothing more but lay emphasis on those emotions you’re about to experience. So when Johannsson’s soundscape evolves into something new on The Last Foul Wind I Ever Knew, you might feel scared or empowered, because of how deep this music sounds. And the meditative minimalism in which the voices and instruments are drenched in tells you there is nowhere else to go. It’s you and the music. Alongside modern composers like Max Richter, Peter Gregson and Philip Glass, Johannsson embraces post-minimalism in a very Romantic way, looking for stretched melodies only to bemuse us. I was mentioning the vertebra of a mythical whale, and Drone Mass exactly feels like a skeleton of air and water hidden somewhere in front of our faces, but that only appears to you with sounds. It’s the whirl of the Huldufolk, the hidden world of Iceland symbolizing their unique relationship with nature.
And then we haveMoral Vacuums. Never before has a drone and ambient music piece moved me this much. It’s the pinnacle of meshing together choir voices and a orchestra of strings, making it even hard to tell which one is which. They all make room for the strings of that lone violin acting like a driving force through the vastness of the world. If classical music gathers now influences from a lot of modern genres, Moral Vacuums definitely is one of those songs that has to become a standard bearer. And now we rest. The last two tracks of the 50-minute oratorio, Take the Night Air and The Mountain View, the Majesty of the Snow-Clad Peaks, From a Place of Contemplation and Reflection (yes this is the complete title) both act like an immense cloud enveloping us into a blurry yet familiar world. One is True to Divine Objects and Moral Vacuums enabled us to become a part of nature. We were the cascades, the ice, the wind in the grass and the boiling rocks. But now we go back to our human form, as an observer who experienced what is now spreading in front of our eyes. And what we see is the final soundscape of Johann Johannsson, between Renaissance polyphony, an Egyptian Coptic Gospel and many other obsessions that ACME and the Theatre of Voices managed to breathe life into.