Friendship Survival Guide arrives as a blessing and a gift. In many ways we are still mourning the loss of Jóhann Jóhannsson, as his music is woven into the fabric of our lives. In the eight ensuing years, a few posthumous recordings have been released, along with a pair of box sets collecting his oeuvre; but the composer’s voice has been mostly silent since then.
Enter close friend Adam Wiltzie, who earlier had collaborated with Jóhannsson on the scores for The Theory of Everything and Arrival. Wiltzie had held onto the analog tape loops from these sessions and later recorded guitars under the guidance of Steve Albini before Albini’s own passing, adding an extra layer of urgent melancholy.
Friendship Survival Guide is an elegiac statement, approved by Jóhannsson’s family, that is not as much about surviving a friendship as it is about the experience of losing a friend. Wiltzie honors Jóhannsson while extending his legacy, completing an “artifact they created together” and offering it to the world in hopes that the healing might continue. As one might expect from the co-founder of Stars of the Lid, the music is as much ambient as modern composition, a melding of disciplines that forms a harmonious whole.
The poignant “September Nineteen Sixty Nine” leads off the set; in this month, both composers were born but two days apart. The opening notes are like a lift-off, the launching of a life; in this case, two lives that would eventually intertwine. Immediately one is impressed by the brass and strings, the stately drama, the grand chords, surging first to one peak and then another. In less than three minutes, Wiltzie encapsulates all of his friend’s astonishing talents.
The two-part “Dazed and Reflective Glory” introduces an abrasion of notes, like fading memories, corroded tapes, sheet music nibbled by moths. This abrasion fades in the second half as clearer, more insistent notes shine through, as if to suggest that time will not decorate this memory with rust. Every time the notes fade, we fear it will be the last, but we have learned otherwise. When the gentle choir begins to sing on “Mourners Will Be Outcast,” one thinks less of a funeral service than of an ascension, with new compositions wafting through the ether, descending through the clouds, borne on the mist and dew.
Even as the choir recedes, the organ continues to play. Forboding clouds gather in “Exceptional Proportions,” threatening a deluge that thankfully does not occur. Instead there lies tenderness and hope in the nourishing rain of “Give Into Gravity.” The piece is an invitation to incorporate grief with its worthy companion, gratitude, and never to allow the first to walk alone. The choir returns like the acknowledgment of a prayer.
The first single, “White Gloves & Turtlenecks,” is also the album’s shortest piece; and contains the album’s most overt violin melody, like a voice cutting through the fog. The track is matched with a video: the first part of a continuing story, promising more. In contrast, “Soft Favourites” is by far the album’s longest and most ambient piece, a soft reflection like a walk home from the chapel in slowly-falling snow. Midway through the piece, new chords emerge like visitations. The stars are twinkling, sending messages of their own.
The title “In Ever Decreasing Circles” suggests fate closing in, the inevitable weight of time. Echo and breath populate the composition, along with some surprising glissandos that recall the score for Arrival. Yet this is only fitting, as a fine line exists between science and science fiction, just as there does between faith and fact. “Where You Are Now, Voyager” offers a clever play on words, referring not only to Voyager and its famed golden disc, but to the notes of a beloved composer, echoing through time; and to Jóhannsson himself, a voyager lost to us physically, but spiritually present, made all the more real through this exquisite resurrection of sound. (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 