Jóhann Jóhannsson – Personal Effects (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Personal Effects (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Personal Effects (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 36:58 minutes | 317 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Deutsche Grammophon presents the previously-unreleased soundtrack to the 2008 film Personal Effects, written by the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Directed by Emmy-winning David Hollander, Personal Effects stars Ashton Kutcher as Walter, a wrestler who finds romance with an older woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) when he returns home to punish the man who brutally murdered his sister.
(more…)

Read more

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Orphée (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Orphée (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Orphée (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 46:28 minutes | 460 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

In the six years between And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees and Orphée, Jóhann Jóhannsson became a celebrated film composer, earning back-to-back Oscar nominations for his life-affirming score for The Theory of Everything and his ominous, rough-edged music for Sicario. During this time, Jóhannsson continued to work on personal projects including this, his Deustche Grammophon debut. In its own way, Orphée is also a little like a soundtrack: the composer drew inspiration from the story of Orpheus’ ill-fated attempt to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld, building on Ovid and Jean Cocteau’s versions of the tale in his meditations on death, rebirth, and creativity. The Orpheus myth reflected Jóhannsson’s life while he worked on the album: his move from Copenhagen to Berlin marked the closing of one chapter in his life and the start of a new one. Like And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees, Orphée is both more intimate than some of his larger works, and immediately recognizable as Jóhannsson’s. On “Flight from the City,” a gentle but insistent piano motif rises and falls like breath, while strings deepen its sweet ache; layers of counterpoint inspire bittersweet wonder on “The Drowned World”; “Orphic Hymn” showcases the composer’s flair for choral pieces, with Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices performing lines from Ovid’s text in Renaissance style; and “Fragment II” offers a brief burst of his grander scale with its ever-widening sea of drones and strings. This piece features Orphée’s main motif, an ascending harmonic pattern that also appears on the ghostly “A Song for Europa,” which introduces the staticky, numbers station-like recordings that flicker through the album, adding another layer of distance and mystery. Orphée’s studies in change give equal time time to mourning and hope, whether on the spine-tingling “A Pile of Dust” or the way “A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder” and “By the Roes, and by the Hinds of the Field” dance between joy and sorrow. Similarly, Jóhannsson makes the album’s chiaroscuro qualities explicit on “De Luce et Umbra,” where a shadowy, almost subliminal pulse adds tension to the skyward strings, and on the Emily Dickinson-inspired diptych “Good Morning, Midnight” and “Good Night, Day,” where subtle transitions evoke standing between ends and beginnings. On Orphée, Jóhannsson expresses the need to let some things and people go to let new ones in with remarkable nuance, as well as the affecting beauty fans have come to know and love. ~ Heather Phares
(more…)

Read more

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Gold Dust (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Gold Dust (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Gold Dust (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 22:37 minutes | 215 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 3221466 Records DK

Composer J’ohann J’ohannsson (1969-2018) wrote music for a wide array of media, including theatre, dance, television, and films. His work is stylized by its blending of classical instrumentation with electronic elements.

J’ohann’s body of work contains previously unreleased music never used by the projects it was composed for – held in purgatory by the constraints of the capitalist industrial machine. Gold Dust, available now via Redbird Music, is a selection of meaningful fragments hatched in a suspended state of reality to provide an armor that can be dissolved only when those pieces trigger the senses.

During his lifetime, J’ohann produced studio albums with Touch, 4AD, 130701, and Deutsche Grammophon, which released his last solo record, Orph’ee. His first solo album, Englab”orn (2002, Touch), drew from a broad set of influences, ranging from Erik Satie, Bernard Herrmann, Purcell and Moondog to electronic music issued by labels such as Mille Plateaux and Mego.

A great deal of J’ohann’s work in his last years closely entwined with film: Sicario (2015), the score of which was nominated for all major awards, Arrival (2016), which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and such notable film credits as James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (2014), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
(more…)

Read more

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Englabörn & Variations (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Englabörn & Variations (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Englabörn & Variations (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:34:57 minutes | 884 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Epos String Quartt and percussionist Matthias M.D. Hemstock perform compositional music written by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Deutsche Grammophon will release Jóhann Jóhannsson’s critically-acclaimed debut album in a newly-remastered version – now with much fuller and improved sound, and combined with a complete album of brand-new reworks!

Englabörn is a jewel from Jóhann’s special catalogue. Together with the new Variations, this double album – beginning with the hauntingly beautiful and intriguing track, “Odi et Amo”, takes the listener on a journey through the composer’s extraordinary and unique sound-world.

Variations features reworks by internationally acclaimed artists such as legendary Ryūichi Sakamoto, A Winged Victory for the Sullen (feat. Dustin O Halloran), Theater of Voices and Alex Somers, as well as DG’s very own Víkingur Ólafsson – to name but a few.
(more…)

Read more

Johann Johannsson, Yair Elazar Glotman – Last And First Men (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Johann Johannsson, Yair Elazar Glotman - Last And First Men (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Johann Johannsson, Yair Elazar Glotman – Last And First Men (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:05:40 minutes | 634 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

While composing haunting, elegiac concept albums of lost utopias and working for TV and film the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was thinking about a project on an even larger scale since 2010 – a multimedia work that would include his own visual concept, direction and music.
(more…)

Read more

Johann Johannsson – Retrospective II – Rarities (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Johann Johannsson - Retrospective II - Rarities (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Johann Johannsson – Retrospective II – Rarities (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 20:16 minutes | 223 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Complementing the April 2019 release of Retrospective I, which included such seminal works as The Miners’ Hymns, Copenhagen Dreams and Free the Mind, this second and final volume offers a wide-ranging selection of Jóhannsson’s multi-award-winning film scores and influential studio albums. Presented as a limited edition deluxe hardcover book, it comprises eight CDs and a bonus DVD of his 2016 “Live at Funkhaus Berlin” concert. It also contains rare photographs of the composer, as well as two new essays by John Schaefer and Wyndham Wallace that provide insights into Jóhannsson’s life and his aesthetic outlook.
(more…)

Read more

Johann Johannsson – Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Johann Johannsson - Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Johann Johannsson – Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 41:17 minutes | 420 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lakeshore Records

Before his death in February, Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson scored the forthcoming horror film Mandy. This is Johannsson’s final score. The Mandy score was co-produced by Johann and Randall Dunn. It features Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley on guitar. The album was later assembled with the help of co-producers Pepijn Caudron and Yair Glotman. Johann Johannssonn is recognised as one of the best modern film composers. His score to ‘The Theory Of Everything’ won a Golden Globe for Best Original Score and was nominated for the same Academy Award, whilst his stunning work on ‘Sicario’ also earned him the Academy Award nomination for best score. His other notable works include ‘Arrival’, ‘Prisoners’ and ‘The Mercy’. Directed by Panos Cosmatos and starring Nicholas Cage, Mandy is about a man who hunts the religious sect responsible for killing his wife.
(more…)

Read more

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Arrival (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Arrival (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Arrival (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:10 minutes | 486 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Deutsche Grammophon is excited to announce the November release of Arrival (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) with music composed and produced by Johann Johannsson.
(more…)

Read more

Johann Johannsson – Drone Mass (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Johann Johannsson - Drone Mass (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Johann Johannsson – Drone Mass (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 51:21 minutes | 980 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

The arrival of this recording of Drone Mass—some seven years after its premiere performance and four years after Jóhann Jóhannsson’s death—somewhat blurs the definition of what a “posthumous” release looks like for a contemporary classical composer. Jóhannsson’s work is seldom decoupled from his playing of it, featuring him as the primary performer, but does not perform on this recording though he did at its premiere and several other performances. Additionally, the composition itself was commissioned by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), who are performing it here (and who also performed it with Jóhannsson), making this release—originally recorded in 2019—a discographically unique one. It is also, more importantly, a musically intriguing one. As with much of Jóhannsson’s work—whether for classical ensembles, film scores, or electronic experimentation—the pieces are both tense and elegiac, toying with form and structure to evoke both a well-defined soundscape and a dynamic emotional response. Rather than digging into a postmodern take on chamber music or ambient electronics, here, Jóhannsson is putting to work the vocal skills of a large ensemble (the eight-piece Theatre of Voices) to deliver his hymn-like interpretations of the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, writings which were discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in the mid-20th century. Unintelligible to modern ears but deeply evocative nonetheless, the vocal polyphony on display is immersive and haunting. Early on in the recording, the “Triptych in Mass” sets the tone with its absolutely dizzying combination of voices, dissonance, and drone, leaving the listener both breathless and anxious. Other segments—”The Last Foul Wind I Ever Knew” and the two-part “Divine Objects”—are similarly intense. By the time “The Low Drone of Circulating Blood, Diminishes With Time” initiates the closing four-part sequence of the piece, Jóhannsson has shown that he is clearly disinterested in easy beauty or background ambience and is, instead, pursuing a thoughtful, dynamic, and intent music that rewards a listener’s focus and engagement. It’s a forceful and unforgiving piece that posits an exciting shift in direction from the composer that, sadly, appears to have not gotten any further exploration. Nonetheless, as a document of one of his final works, Drone Mass is an exciting and exhilarating statement. – Jason Ferguson
(more…)

Read more

Hildur Guðnadóttir & Jóhann Jóhannsson – Mary Magdalene (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Hildur Guðnadóttir & Jóhann Jóhannsson – Mary Magdalene (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 40:02 minutes | 391 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Milan Records

Milan Records will release the official soundtrack album for the biblical drama Mary Magdalene. The album features the film’s original music composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir (Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Strong Island) and Jóhann Jóhannsson (Arrival, The Theory of Everything, Sicario, Prisoners). The soundtrack will be released digitally overseas, March 23. Mary Magdalene is directed by Garth Davis (Lion) and stars Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tahar Rahim. The movie tells the story of Mary, a young woman in search of a new way of living, who defies her traditional family to join a new social movement led by the charismatic Jesus of Nazareth and soon finds a place for herself within the movement and at the heart of a journey that will lead to Jerusalem. The drama was released in several European markets earlier this month. No word yet on a domestic release date.

(more…)

Read more
%d bloggers like this: