Jóhannsson was a fan of Soviet science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, and was influenced by Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel 'Last and First Men'.
Recording & Production
Yair Elazar Glotman aimed for an instrumentation and orchestration that felt 'raw, organic, but nothing that would suggest a specifi c time' to match the abstract nature of the film.
Interpretation
Jóhannsson chose actress Tilda Swinton to narrate the words, wanting her voice to sound like a 'strange academic lecture, tinged with a melancholy lyricism, an authoritative voice from the future'.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Jóhannsson was fascinated by 'spomeniks', brutalist war memorials in former Yugoslavia, which were intended as symbols of unification for a diverse state, drawing on prehistoric, Mayan, and Sumerian art.
Composition History
Jóhannsson spent a month traveling through the Balkans with Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, filming the spomeniks on 16mm black-and-white film.
Composition History
The idea for this album came to Jóhann Jóhannsson, an Icelandic composer, in 2010 after seeing an art book by Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers titled 'Spomenik'.
Recording & Production
After Jóhannsson's death, Berlin-based composer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman finished the work, incorporating Jóhannsson's harmonium, which had been in his family for three generations.
