Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman – Last And First Men (2020) (*****)

What’s to like?

Last composition from one of contemporary classical music’s finest composers, and a fitting requiem to his legacy.

The low down

Along with Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson is probably one of the better-known composers of music which combines contemporary classical with ambient electronica, reaching a wider audience through soundtracks for films, such as Arrival and Sicario.

Jóhannsson has also produced a considerable body of work through his solo albums, including Fordlandia, thematically influenced by the failure of Henry Ford’s Brazilian rubber plant Fordlândia, and  IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, inspired by his father, an IBM engineer who used early hardware to compose melodies during his downtime at work. Jóhannsson used sounds produced from the electromagnetic emissions of the IBM 1401 as part of his composition.

For a such a creative artist, the possibilities can be boundless, and it’s a tragedy that Jóhannsson passed away in 2018 – he was only 48. However, he has left listeners one last legacy with this newly released album Last And First Men, combining sound and image with a cd and accompanying bluray.

The composition has had a fascinating journey, from the germ of an idea to the completed work. Initially, Jóhannsson was inspired by a photography book depicting huge, brutalist war monuments built in the former Republic of Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 80s. He then travelled through the Balkans, capturing these images on 16mm black and white film.

When it came time to compose music to accompany the images, he turned to science fiction writers of the 1930s for ideas, and was inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last And First Men, depicting a history of the solar system across two billion years. The music very quickly fell into place after that, at which point Jóhannsson invited actress Tilda Swinton to provide narration across the music.

The project was premiered before a live audience in July 2017, but in true artistic tradition, Jóhannsson felt the piece needed further refinement, which he began working on shortly before he passed away.

However, he had chosen to refine the music with a collaborator, Berlin composer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman, and it is thanks to Glotman’s that we now have this music in recorded format. Glotman had to trust his instincts for the most part in completing the project, tracking down out-takes and fleshing out sketches, but he also had the brilliant idea of bringing together diverse musicians who had worked with Jóhannsson throughout his whole career, individuals with a unique understanding of the composer’s psyche.

As Glotman comments in the liner notes “It made everything much more intimate and allowed us to bring fragility and rawness to the playing that fit the materiality of the film.”

Having absorbed the liner notes, I tried the cd first, which includes the complete score, but without Swinton’s narration. Focussing solely on the music and sounds, it was surprisingly easy to be drawn into this alternative existence, and conjure up my own images of barren wastelands and desolate landscapes. Indeed, at some points I felt like I was experiencing a 21^st century version of Lygeti’s soundscapes in 2001: A Space Odyssey when mankind encounters the monolith.

This is the kind of music where you could imagine travellers arriving from another world, greeted with a planet devoid of life, and wondering “what happened?”

During each of the twenty music cues I would glance down to look at the title of the track playing and realise that it perfectly matched the mood of the music coming from the speakers, and vice versa – whichever came first, the title or the music, there is a satisfying symbiosis here. However, individual tracks rarely stand out here because the composition needs to play out over its 65 minutes for the listener to appreciate the range of moods, melodies and ambient sounds.

So well blended are they, that it’s pointless trying to discern between the classical and electronic elements – they are so well blended, with a mixture percussion, vocals, violin, cello, harmonium, synthesisers, tape loops, and horns.

This is music that feels reflective, prophetic and unsettling – easy to immerse yourself in, but leaving you questioning what might lie ahead for us, as individuals and as the dominant species facing the threat of an extinction event.

With that thought lingering, I then sat down with the blu-ray to watch the audio-visual version originally envisaged by Jóhannsson. Even though I was already familiar with the music, listening to it as a backdrop to the images felt like a different experience, as Swinton’s narration fills in the backstory. (It turns out that my imagination wasn’t too far off the mark, but I won’t reveal further here so as not to spoil the listener’s close encounter of the first kind.)

What I can tell you though, is the soundtrack is beautifully mixed into high definition 5.1 surround, and expanding the audio across a wider sound stage draws you in even further. The narration is locked into the centre speaker, with the music taking up the four surrounds, and it’s effective. Swinton’s calm, almost emotionless diction is sporadic, with brief short statements, and never distracts from the music or the ambience.

The film itself is simply a montage of images, in black and white, complete with the blemishes you’d experience with old movie reels, which add to the overall experience of history recounted over a long period of time. The film’s editing enhances that effect, with slow panning across shots, in a respectful homage to the similar style adopted for classic sci-fi movies 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

However, you can approach Last And First Men in different ways. You can immerse yourself in the whole concept and ponder on this treatise on our existence and relative brevity in the bigger scheme of things, or you can forego the philosophy and enjoy a fine example of image and sound blended into something greater than the sum of their parts.

Or, you can simply relax to a beautifully crafted suite of music that serves as a fitting requiem to one of our finest contemporary composers.