On February 9, 2018, the 48-year-old Icelandic musician and film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson passed away suddenly from heart failure. Since the early 2000s, Jóhannsson had built up a pristine catalog of solo releases on labels like Touch and 4AD, melding the worlds of ambient, classical, electronica, and avant-garde. But it was Jóhannsson’s transition into scoring films that took him from cult creator of concept records about IBM computers and Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian rubber plant to two-time Oscar nominee (for 2015’s Sicario and 2014’s The Theory of Everything).
Jóhannsson’s gravitation towards the esoteric never left him, though. As a composer, he was as comfortable with dark, gargling electronics as he was traditional orchestration. He blended score and sound design with potency, shifting from intense mood-making to total silence with equal ferocity (he pulled his own score from Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! because he felt it more powerful without music). While this positioned him as refreshingly antithetical to the bombastic or saccharinely string-heavy scores that dominate many big movies, it didn’t mean his work was immune from the same pressures: he was replaced mid-project on Blade Runner 2049 by Hans Zimmer, arguably the most ubiquitous composer in Hollywood.
Jóhannsson’s final project as a composer was Mandy, a psychedelic horror revenge flick released September 14th. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, Mandy stars Andrea Riseborough and Nicolas Cage, who (in full-on Cage mode) seeks screeching vengeance upon a local cult that has destroyed his life. Jóhannsson accompanies the violent chaos, set in the early ’80s, with dread-inducing drones, shimmering synths, and forceful full-band eruptions. He worked with producer Randall Dunn (Wolves in the Throne Room, Boris) on the recording sessions, and they brought in Sun O)))’s Stephen O’Malley for ground-trembling guitarwork. Then, following Jóhannsson’s death, Kreng’s Pepijn Caudron and composer Yair Elazar Glotman formed his cues from the film, along with other material from his hard drive, into the soundtrack album.
Together, Dunn, Cosmatos, Caudron, and Jóhannsson’s longtime manager, Tim Husom, tell the story of how Jóhann’s final score came together.
Panos Cosmatos: “I never considered Jóhann for a movie. I loved his music and thought he was one of the great composers, but I never thought he would want to do it. I also saw his approach as being a little bit more stripped down than what we wanted. However, after talking to him for five minutes, it was clear he had unexplored avenues he was itching to get at.”
Tim Husom: “I remember how enthusiastic Jóhann felt being involved with a project that allowed him to try something new, in an environment that wasn’t a big film studio. Working on a crazy acid-trip horror film with one of his favorite directors placed him squarely in his happy place. After all of the awards attention in the previous years, it was a much needed energy to bring him some balance.”
Cosmatos: “I wanted the film to feel like a disintegrating rock opera. Not a literal one, with people singing and shit, but an emotional, larger-than-life sonic and visual experience. Jóhann got really excited when I told him that.”
Randall Dunn: “I think Jóhann was trying to get a team together that fit the film. A lot of Panos’ references were very rock influenced so Jóhann wanted to go in a direction that he hadn’t really gone before—more rock or heavy metal. This is a very familiar world for me, so he asked me to produce.
We had some wild ideas early on that would’ve been insane, like having a nine-piece band including Sunn O))) and a drummer. The idea being to do it in more of a live scenario, improvising to the finished picture and having synthesizers set up for anyone to jump on. Almost like a live score but in a studio. You then realize the budget and time frame for such a thing. Stephen O’Malley came in to do two tracks and was really involved in the writing of them. It’s such a specialized thing that he does, you can’t be like, ‘Do it like this.’ O’Malley was given a tremendous amount of room to be creative.”
(O’Malley declined to participate in this piece.)
Cosmatos: “Sometimes we would have oblique discussions, like I would say, ‘I want this scene to feel like you’re in the backseat of your big brother’s Trans Am and you’re with your girlfriend, and you’re kind of afraid. They’re smoking weed but the car smells like leather and air freshener.’ Generally he would say, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ Jóhann seemed to innately understand where this film was coming from and was really excited about exploring this part of himself, musically.”
Dunn: “There was a lot of communication about which specific analogue synthesizers would be appropriate. We found a studio in Italy where we did a lot of the synth recording and it was phenomenal. We were really trying to stay away from any tropes or clichés, we wanted to subvert it into a whole new style.”
Cosmatos: “We both had the same attitude, which was: We want to explore and evoke these things from our past, but at the same time we don’t want to just be nostalgic. We want to turn the past into the future. We definitely bonded over Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack and bands like Venom and Celtic Frost.”
Dunn: “Panos was referencing a lot of early Van Halen too, and my role was to be a bit of a rock purist. Jóhann and I related on things that inspired us; like for the guitar and drum sounds on ‘Children of the New Dawn,’ we were referencing Marillion and the Alan Parsons Project—more progressive rock from the late ’70s. We were also trying to play a role; the film takes place in 1983 so we wanted the music to have a hue of that but not to be, like, electro.”
Caudron: “I was hired originally as a music editor for chopping up Jóhann’s stuff and making it fit the movie. But they were running a bit slow in post-production so I ended up writing a couple of cues too, mostly based on samples from Jóhann.
Then, shortly after the movie premiered at Sundance in January, we heard of Jóhann’s death. There was no soundtrack ready. We had cues but we needed someone to produce the soundtrack album because Jóhann felt very strongly about not just dumping 42 cues on a CD. He wanted it to be a standalone listening experience. So we [Caudron and Yair Elazar Glotman] had to find a way to do that, which was a daunting task. We had to make sure that it was true to Jóhann’s vision.”
Dunn: “The music in the film and the soundtrack release are very different. I heard the soundtrack release first and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ but when I saw the film there was more of the stuff that I remembered mixing. The soundtrack release is almost like bonus material in a way. There’s so much there that informs how the other stuff got there.”
Caudron: “Jóhann finished about 90 percent of the material so there was an artistic blueprint of what it should sound like. Then it was just a matter of eliminating my own tastes and trying to do what Jóhann would do. I got involved without having a personal relationship with Jóhann; I was due to meet him for the first time two weeks after he died. This gave me a kind of objective stance that was pure instead of sentimental. It might have been too intense for a really close collaborator of his to finish it.
I was sent his complete hard drive. Going through it was like looking inside a part of his brain. How does it work? How does he organize stuff? It was pure chaos. It’s a very personal thing and I didn’t expect it to be so emotional for me to look through a hard drive—it’s just a stupid hard drive—but the person is in there.”
Dunn: “Jóhann was really open to absolute chaos, and you always find gems when you go down that road. Also, he had a really intense aesthetic about what types of sounds he liked. It was cool to hear through his ears at times—realizing what you thought was cool really isn’t, rehearing your own aesthetics through the boss' ears.”
Caudron: “The way Jóhann processed some sounds was just completely out of the box. The way he could fuck up a sound using compression in a very unorthodox way was incredible. He abused sounds all the time and at the same time was addicted to beauty. He found a perfect balance between those.”
Dunn: “I stepped back from the film for a minute after he died, so when the trailer came out I just started crying. I imagine when I see the film in a theater it’s going to be ridiculous—I’m probably going to be crying all the time. I feel completely lucky for being involved and meeting Jóhann.”
Caudron: “Randall and I Skyped a couple of days after Jóhann passed. There he is, this big, strong, bearded man and we were both just crying like 15 year olds. It’s been quite a ride. Working with the music was not the hardest part—it was trying not to omit someone from the equation. It was not only producing music—it was more like running a ship where the captain has died on board and we still have to get the ship safely to shore.”
Husom: “I was continually impressed by how Jóhann challenged himself to create something new: a new process, a new collaborator, a new sound, a new way of recording. His approach to all of his work started with the idea of jumping off a different platform. From the pounding, below-the-earth’s-crust evil created for Sicario, or the super creepy intellectual vocal manipulations done on Arrival, to the raw, dark rock score for Mandy.
Jóhann’s daughter and I are about to do a deal with Deutsche Grammophon to release a bunch of music over the next five to six years. This includes some obscure documentary score that’s never been heard, and I’m talking to Darren Aronofsky’s people about releasing the music created for Mother! that didn’t get used. Blade Runner 2049 wasn’t complete enough to release to the public, so that won’t be released. We have just organized all of Jóhann’s hard drives and you never know what hidden treasures are in there. We want to keep his legacy alive, but we also need to be smart about quality control and respecting his work.”
“Mandy” and its soundtrack are out now.
