Johannsson, Johan ‎– IBM 1401, A User's Manual ‎– IBM 1401, A User's Manual

NEW VINYL LP ON 4AD 2017

2 X 180 GRAM CLEAR VINYL.

Johann Johannsson, IBM 1401 A Users Manual, Double Clear Vinyl LP. Never before pressed on vinyl, IBM 1401 A User’s Manual is one of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s most loved works. Released in 2006, the decade since its release has seen Jóhann establish himself as one of the most important composers in the world today, most notably scoring movies such as ‘Arrival’, ‘Sicario’ and ‘The Theory Of Everything’. Inspired by the work his father did in the Sixties when chief maintenance engineer of one of Iceland’s first computers, Jóhann originally wrote ‘IBM 1401, A User’s Manual’ to accompany a dance piece by long-standing collaborator and friend Erna Ómarsdóttir. For this album release, he rewrote it for a sixty-piece string orchestra, with a new final movement (built around a poem by Dorothy Parker) and incorporating both electronics and reel-to-reel recordings made by his father and friends in 1971 of an enormous IBM 1401 mainframe computer singing the hymn ‘Ísland Ögrum Skorið’ by Sigvaldi Kaldalóns as it was being decommissioned.

Tracklist

A1     Part 1 / IBM 1401 Processing Unit     8:32
A2     Part 2 / IBM 1403 Printer     9:33
B1     Part 3 / IBM 1402 Card Read-Punch     10:23
B2     Part 4 / IBM 729 II Magnetic Tape Unit 7:15
C     Part 5 / The Sun's Gone Dim And The Sky's Turned Black 7:09

    Live
D1     Part 1 / IBM 1401 Processing Unit     
D2     Part 5 / The Sun's Gone Dim And The Sky's Turned Black