Maybe this, his fourth solo album, is the archetypal Jóhannsson record. Of course he went in many directions, but throughout his records and soundtrack, the play between orchestra and electronics, between the epic and the mundane, between the elegiac and the peculiar are almost always presence, and this brings all those things together in purified form. Using the old recording of a slightly silly beeping, burring tone that his late father had managed to coax from a 1960s business computer as a base, he built a composition that expands to huge proportions but always keeps that still, small, sad core of preserved memory pulsing away at the heart of it. And on the closing track, with lyrics adapted from the ever mordant Dorothy Parker, it all becomes almost too much to bear. As the director Alan Moorehead who
worked with Jóhannsson on 'The Theory of Everything', it's “like he wrote his
own requiem.”