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Jóhann Jóhannsson
IBM 1401 - A Users Manual
4AD
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Article
written by Phil O
Nov 29, 2006.
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The term ‘Concept Album’ may provoke many people to seek out the nearest copy of Yes’s ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ and break it over Jon Anderson’s head. This action would, of course, be perfectly justified. But hold your horses, here’s an album that may, to a slim degree, make you reconsider. Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘IBM 1401 – A Users Manual’ is a tribute to the titular 1960’s 1401 Data Processor and to his father, a chief architect in its design and a keen musician who harnessed the machine, against its purpose, to produce music. When the 1401 was finally laid to rest in 1971, its melodies and various operational bleeps were documented on tape for one last time and it is these sounds that serve as the inspiration for this record.
The album is split into five segments, all elegantly performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra with occasional interjections of organ, piano and bells from multi-instrumentalist Jóhannsson and an assortment of electronic buzzes and tones sampled directly from the 1401 itself. The fairly staid voice of an anonymous technician from a maintenance instruction tape is immortalised in one segment, the monotone chap relating such inspired couplets as “Do not forget to check that the cap nut of the draining port is properly tightened” over heartbreakingly beautiful string arrangements. In theory, this may sound like a disparate clash of sounds, but the combination of his deadpan, impassive tones with the deeply moving strings is a masterstroke and genuinely stirs great loss and nostalgia for a bygone technological age. Jóhannsson himself provides vocals on the final section, his singing heavily tweaked through a distorted vocoder, giving the whole composition the air of a tragic lament sung by a sad robot to his dying 1401 brother. Elsewhere, the compositions are punctuated by vast gulfs of silence which only seem to highlight the atmosphere of CPU bereavement and despite the momentum flagging around the halfway point, the record still maintains the mood of an affecting tribute.
‘IBM 1401 - A Users Manual’ serves as a poignant homage to an outmoded piece of kit and a moving dedication to the interaction between man and machine in an innocent age when the internet was just a glimmer in Bob Kahn’s eye and mainframes needed regular oiling. Whoever thought that the sound of someone reading a computer manual could be so touching?
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