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Johann Johaansson - Englaborn
Englaborn is Johannīs first solo album. It is derived from music he wrote for an Icelandic play of the same name. For the cd release on Touch, the music was revised and restructured to make it stand as a work on its own and not simply function as a collection of cues. The music is written for string quartet, piano, organ, glockenspiel and percussion. These elements were processed and manipulated, adding delicate electronic backgrounds to the otherwise entirely acoustic recordings. One song, "Odi et Amo", is a setting of Catullusīs famous poem. "This was a happy accident, I'd written the music and wanted a computerized counter-tenor vocal singing a Latin text and was looking through a collection of Latin poetry when I remembered this poem from college and it did fit the melody perfectly and was also thematically perfect for the play. Itīs in the final scene. What I really like about it is the harsh contrast of the computer voic! e and the strings, the alchemy of total opposites, the sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table." "In reality I was thinking of something entirely unrelated to the play most of the time I was writing the music, almost as a distancing technique, to create the total antithesis of what was happening on stage. The plays is extremely violent and disturbing and basically when faced with the script I decided to work against it as much as possible and just try to write the most beautiful music I could. That approach seems to have worked, at any rate, the music got really good reviews, the leading drama critic calling it "the most beautiful Iīve heard in Icelandic theatre." I must say Iīve never had such a strong reaction to anything Iīve done before, strangers have actually stopped me in the street and hugged me because of it...! Bizarre.. It is gratifying though, because itīs probably the most personal thing Iīve done, this stuff is very very clos! e to me. I think itīs probably completely devoid of irony (rare for me); I was almost embarrassed to play it to people at first."
Our Price: $14.99
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