Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual began with an object that most composers would probably never think of as musical material: an old mainframe computer. His father, Jóhann Gunnarsson, had worked with the IBM 1401 in Iceland and recorded the machine on reel-to-reel tape decades earlier. Those recordings eventually became part of a composition first written for string quartet and dance, then radically expanded for the 2006 album into a score for a sixty-piece string orchestra, electronics and the original tapes.
What stays with me is that Jóhannsson did not imitate a computer. He let the actual technological past enter the music.
That changes the emotional weight of the electronic sounds. They are not futuristic effects. They are recordings of a machine already becoming obsolete. Strings surround those fragile traces with something almost elegiac, turning computing history into memory.
Electronic music often celebrates the newest machine in the room. This piece does the opposite. It asks what happens when a machine becomes old enough to be remembered.
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