Johann Johannsson - Fordlandia

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February 2, 2009, 10:36 PM

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For those unfamiliar with Johann Johannsson’s output, he works equally comfortably with symphony orchestras and samplers to create impossibly expansive, moving, often desolate and unerringly beautiful compositions.

Fordlandia is the second in a proposed trio of aural delights from Icelandic composer Johann Johannson. The first was IBM 1401, A User’s Manual – a work themed around early computer music; the sampling sine waves coaxed out of a 60’s model computer and the emotional attachment of those who worked on its creation.

The themes flowing through Johann Johannsson’s latest release are equally ambitions and marginally less abstract. Johannsson themed the album around failed utopia, and in particular an Amazonian rubber plantation used by Henry Ford in the 1920’s.

The workforce were largely indigenous and when Ford took over, they were ‘Americanised’. They were presented with unfamiliar food such as hamburgers and French fries and they were probably discouraged from understanding irony. Many became unhappy and unsettled and refused to work. The ugly situation culminated in a revolt, sending the American managers fleeing into the jungle.

In the opening and title track, the LP dawns upon the listener with an extremely slow crescendo. The pace of this piece firmly asserts the key theme of nature as the former half grows, slowly undulating, gaining strength in layers of instrumentation. In contrast, the latter half of the piece withers away with a 5-minute ritardando (quite possibly, Johannsson has remarked, the longest ever committed to record).

It should be noted that such is the detail of the composition of this record, there is a great scope for leeway in its interpretation. Another theme threaded through the album is nature reclaiming once human territory, which Johannsson believes is summed up in the image of an abandoned locomotive overgrown with plush greenery.

In Fordlandia – Arial View, a minor key and weeping strings paint a picture of the full devastation of individual indigenous lives and the end of an age-old culture in the name of progress.

The final piece, How We Left Fordlandia asserts the inevitability of Nature’s reclamation of what is her’s in a long, peaceful diminuendo not dissimilar to the significant final bars of Gustav Holst’s ‘Saturn – The Bringer of Old Age.’

Much like Holst’s Planet Suite, Fordlandia tells a cohesive and vivid story and is rewarding to repeated listens. It is both cinematic and intimate and was written and produced with expert sensitivity and control.

Wether the LP was intended to condemn corporations or mourn for lost cultures, Johann Johannsson has proven the old adage that real beauty can be drawn from tragedy and, in my interpretation, illustrates that mankind is ultimately and inevitably second to Nature.

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