Jóhann Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer born in Reykjavík who studied languages and literature before emerging from Reykjavík’s late-1980s indie rock scene; in 1999 he co-founded the experimental collective Kitchen Motors. He became internationally acclaimed for film scores that fused orchestral writing with electronic and minimalist textures, including Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016), and James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything (2014), for which he won a Golden Globe and received an Academy Award nomination. Beyond film, he released acclaimed concert-music albums on Deutsche Grammophon and other labels, including Orphée (2016) and IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, blending contemporary classical composition with ambient and electronic idioms. He died in Berlin in 2018 at age 48.

Jóhannsson was a defining voice in 21st-century film scoring, credited with popularizing a minimalist, texturally rich hybrid of orchestral and electronic music that reshaped contemporary soundtrack aesthetics, while his concert albums established him as a serious and influential figure in contemporary art music in his own right.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3hann_J%C3%B3hannsson