Icelandic nutters write mainframe musical

Jóhann Jóhannsson's father worked for IBM back in the 1960s and recorded the noises produced by the entry-level mainframe picked up on an AM radio. This is what passed for geek entertainment before Teh InterWeb was invented by Al Gore.

Not wishing to be out-weirded by his dad, young Jóhann has set these noises to music that his myspace page describes as 'stately, slow-building and hauntingly melodic', but which I prefer to call 'derivative, sub-Vaughan Williams noodling'.

But even this isn't weird enough for young Jóhann. Oh dearie me, no. The icing and glacé cherry on the metaphorical cake come in the form of an original recording of an IBM engineer reading the manual for a card punch and 'interpretive dancer' Erna Ómarsdóttir cavorting about the stage.

Now Jóhann has recorded a CD of his masterwork IBM 1401, A User's Manual, complete with sixty piece orchestra. If you feel like being 'quietly bewitched' why not pop over to his site where you can listen to snippets and view Youtubery of the whole thing? µ

Inq Factoid
In the 1970s, late and much lamented British mainframer ICL launched the ME29 - a mid-range mainframe aimed at the same market as the IBM 1401. ICL commissioned a geezer called Richard Harvey to produce an album of music to accompany the launch. I still have a copy and despite its Godawful title - A New Way of Seeing - I have to confess that it's actually quite good. Better than Coldplay, anyway.

L'INQ
IBM 1401, A User's Manual