One of the themes in my ongoing work on the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson is the difference and overlap between diegetic and non-diegetic music. That is, music that characters in a film or television show can hear — played through a radio or performed in front of them — and that which can only be heard by the viewer.
Though this paper — presented at Historical Materialism in London on November 10th, 2023 — doesn’t take up that specific topic, in writing it, I realized that I would be unable to do what is commonly done in most presentations on the politics of music: play a part of a song, then talk about it, followed by another song and yet another block of spoken text. I would need to play the music as I spoke about it. So, I invite you to play the audio (which includes samples of Jóhannsson’s work) and read along as you listen.
I have no idea whether this successfully communicates the brilliance of Jóhannsson’s music, but am comfortable leaving that for readers/listeners to judge for themselves. Text and audio are available to paid subscribers below.
Of all the manifold experiences humans weave into music, loss seems to be one of the most enduring. Loss of life, loss of love, loss of what we desire; in 16th century English folk music and the latest K-pop single; personal, collective, altogether ineffable. The sudden disappearance of what should be is elemental to conscious existence, repeatedly recurring in song, opening us up to new, wondrous, terrible planes of possibility.
So it is with the work of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Take, for example, the score for psychedelic horror film Mandy, one of the last projects Jóhannsson worked on before his death in 2018. Mandy is a film about loss on an individual level, but loss so deep it unmoors its sufferer from reality. Hallucinogenic loss. Loss that strips away the boundaries of sanity.
Loss that draws whole eras into the abyss. For while Mandy takes place in the early 1980s, its characters are the detritus of the 1960s, the remnants of utopian aspiration curdled into dark fantasy, violent cults, hopeless addiction. Jóhannsson’s score – its vast empty space, its echoing guitars, its bellowing synthesizers – bridges these doomed decades together, transposing the madness of Nicolas Cage’s protagonist Red Miller into something inescapable, almost Lovecraftian in scope.
To engage culturally in the drawn-out end-times of late-late capitalism is inevitably to wonder why we bother in the first place. It is an unenviable task, one which makes Walter Benjamin’s ragpicker archetype seem almost cheerful by comparison.
Yes, we are in a time of monsters, both real and imaginary. No, not all those monsters are necessarily villains, but telling the two apart is best done with the benefit of time, something the Anthropocene denies us.
What we may need, then, is a fundamental change in how we look at events both past and future, a kind of spatio-temporal swap: the ability to view these sequences the same way we might a landscape, identifying exits toward a future worth living. It is akin to what Susan Sontag describes in Benjamin’s work on German tragedy: the ability to “convert time into space.” If music generally comes close to accomplishing this, of spatializing what little time we have left, then Jóhann Jóhannsson’s compositions are particularly useful.
Any regular movie-goer recognizes Jóhannsson’s music. He won a Golden Globe for the score of The Theory of Everything. He was a frequent collaborator with director Denis Villeneuve, providing the score for Prisoners, Arrival, and Sicario, the last of which was nominated for an Oscar for best original score. Villeneuve recruited Jóhannsson to write the score for his Blade Runner 2049, though this collaboration was later abandoned. Jóhannsson also wrote standalone neo-classical symphonies, no less cinematic in scope, and at the end of his life in 2018 was working on his first and only film.
Jóhannsson never explicitly labeled his politics, at least not in English, but listening to his music and how he talked about it, it is clear that he was an artist of the far-left. In 2010, he provided the soundtrack for Bill Morrison’s archival documentary The Miners’ Hymns. There is no dialog in this documentary. Just the historical and newsreel footage of British miners entering and working in the pits, of daily life in the mining towns, marches and parades of the National Union of Miners, and later, footage of miners doing battle with police during the great strike of 1984 and ‘85.
Jóhannsson’s score accompanies these images. It is deliberate and significant that these compositions lean so heavily on brass arrangements: tuba, trumpet, flugelhorn, cornet. These instruments all feature prominently in the tradition of miners’ brass bands, a tradition that has naturally been on the decline since the defeat of the miners’ strike and the closure of the pits.
Watching and listening to The Miners’ Hymns, we are aware that we are seeing and hearing is not there. We are experiencing it through a temporal veil. The compositions’ titles — “An Injury to One is the Concern of All,” “Freedom from Want and Fear,” “The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World” — are all aphorisms familiar in the labor movement. But the embellished prose and the Edwardian cadence remind us of a past refusing to remain inert, twisting its way into the present.
During an interview with The Quietus, Jóhannsson acknowledged the fine line he and Morrison walked in commemorating miners as laborers without celebrating an ecologically destructive mining industry.
I think these are eternal themes. Where we once had coalmines, now we have Amazon fulfilment centres, food processing plants and call centres. Coal-mining is a dirty industry and not very beneficial for the environment, but there is a lesson to be taken from the way the miners were able to organise and create better conditions for themselves and to create an entire culture…
“We do need electricity,” Jóhannsson continued, “but we also need to restrain the inherently exploitative and ravenous nature of capitalism. There is a lot of resistance to this kind of exploitation in Iceland and hopefully it is having an effect on policy.”
Few countries have had so vividly illustrated for them the slow creep of doomsday like Jóhannsson’s native Iceland. This is a country that, in 2019, installed a plaque on the coastline commemorating the death of its first fully melted glacier. Loss on an existential level. Much of Jóhannsson’s work, in particular his 2008 album Fordlandia, explicitly asks what might fill the gap left by such existential, monumental loss.
Fordlandia extrapolates from the story of the real-life rubber colony of the same name, founded by Henry Ford in the jungles of Brazil in the 1920s as a cheap source of rubber for tires. Ford built the colony to have the look and feel of a small town in the American Midwest. Native clothing, food, and culture were forbidden among Fordlandia’s indigenous Brazillian workforce. So were alcohol and playing football. Management had no idea how to tend to rubber trees, and the crop often rotted. Workers frequently revolted, once so violently that the Brazillian army was called in. Fordlandia was abandoned in the 1930s. Its ruins still stand in the jungle of Brazil.
But the album’s compositions are not about Fordlandia per se. They are a contest between Promethean arrogance and the architectonics of the natural world, with ordinary human beings caught in the faultlines. “The Rocket Builder,” with its doomy cello and droning guitars, is inspired by Jack Parsons, the amateur engineer and occultist who — despite being a complete charlatan — essentially established modern rocket science as we understand it. Later, the elegiac “Chimaerica” points to what creativity recklessly wielded mutates into. “The Great God Pan is Dead,” which references the Greek god of the wild, conjures the specter of complete ruination of both nature and industry.
If Fordlandia examines what should not, and ultimately cannot replace the void left by Anthropocene catastrophe, then it begs the question what can. Last and First Men, Jóhannsson’s one and only film — conceived, directed, and scored by him — might be considered its mirror opposite. Against a myopic human race, incapable of its own long-term survival, Last and First Men posits a human race that endures for billions more years. Bill Morrison, in introducing the film, stated that it proved Jóhannsson to be “a great composer of time,” showing not only how time need not be an enemy of human development, but how we might learn to master it, literally composing time itself.
Based on the 1930 novel of the same name by British leftist science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, Jóhannsson’s film takes a great many liberties with the source material. Both stories focus on humans who have gone through several cycles of civilization and barbarism, and who, through genetics and technology, evolve into beings that are unrecognizable to us, though somehow undeniably human. These humans are essentially immortal, place a premium on artistic and scientific exploration, emphasize communal connection, and are capable of such empathy that they are essentially telepathically linked. They are also facing extinction, and the narrative conceit is that this evolved humanity is reaching back through time to warn us of what awaits in the hope that we can put future history on a different trajectory.
The film’s shots feature no human being, recognizable or otherwise. Standing in for them, almost their own characters, are the magnificent brutalist monuments of the former socialist republic of Yugoslavia. The footage emphasizes the sculptures’ other-worldly strangeness. We ask how these forgotten structures could have been made by humans, even as we know they were.
Likewise, the music is eerie, unsettling, ritualistic. Sounds of what might be human voices pinprick the arrangements, modulated just enough that they somehow sound like something else, but with an unmistakable longing running through them.
If there is a way to describe the socialism of Jóhann Jóhannsson, this would be it. It is a post/anti/humanist socialism, a humanist socialism forced to acquaint itself with a post-human world. This isn’t the dark, reactionary post-humanism of thinkers like Nick Land. It is more akin to the outlook put forth by thinkers like Donna Haraway, or Helen Hester and the Laboria Cuboniks collective in The Xenofeminist Manifesto. It’s a thesis that neither fetishizes nor shuns technology, but asks how alteration of the human form can extend the reach of collective subjectivity. While the necessity for a fundamentally different collective human is implicit in most of Jóhannsson’s music, Last and First Men explicitly asks whether that subject can be contained within the human form as we understand it.
This isn’t a mere thought experiment, but a radical utopian heuristic in a moment of ruination. By showing us the most fundamental parts of what it is to be human outside of our actual presence – our consciousness, our ability to create, to build, and, most importantly, to long for a future – Jóhannsson reemphasizes the concept of species being that has been central to Marxism’s understanding of human ontology. What’s more, this structure of feeling invites us to imagine an end to capitalism that predates the end of the world by eons, flipping on its head the quip often attributed to Fredric Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism.
This is not to imply that human longing and creations are trans-historical, at least not on a deep emough timeline. But in supposing that they are, we force ourselves to envision our own temporality of existence being brought in line with deep time. Therein is the possibility of a new matrix of human interrelation, an outside of capitalism, and of a future. It won't give us back what we've lost, but it may yet allow us to survive.
Songs heard in this presentation:
“Mandy Love Theme,” from Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2018.
“The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World,” from The Miners’ Hymns (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2011.
“The Rocket Builder (Lo Pan!),” from Fordlandia, 2008.
“Childhood / Land of the Young,” from Last and First Men, 2020.