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The 30 year old recordings of the IBM 1401 Data Processing System are certainly the first example of digitally produced music in Iceland and one of the first examples of electronic music in the country.

The cold, mechanical sounds of the computer melodies and noises are juxtaposed with the warmth and expressiveness of a large string orchestra, this contrast echoing the work's theme of man versus machine.

Echoing throughout the piece is a four note theme, a fragment of the old Icelandic hymn "Ísland ögrum skorid" by Sigvaldi Kaldalóns, which is taken from the old recording of the IBM computer. The short melody is looped, providing a cantus firmus to which string melodies are added in counterpoint. The printer and computer noises join in to create a thick web of sound which builds and develops slowly.

The Hammond organ is used as a tone generator, rather than as a conventional organ. It is fundamentally a primitive additive synthesizer, i.e. it forms various timbres by blending different harmonics. The IBM 1401 has been called the "Model T" of computing, being the first affordable, mass produced computer, The Hammond, first produced in the late Thirties,  could also be called the "Model T" of electronic instruments, it was certainly one of the first electric musical instruments to attain any popularity. The hypnotic rotation of the Leslie speaker echoes the enormous mechanical tape drives of vintage computing. In the stage version on the piece, the Hammond organ and Leslie speaker play an important part, not only to perform the music, but also by serving as the only décor in the piece with covers removed to reveal the underlying mechanisms. The Leslie's rotary speakers provide a hypnotic counterpoint to the dancer's movements. There is also something very 19th century about the Hammond in the somewhat Victorian austerity of its design and the whirling tonewheels and glowing vacuum tubes still suggest its 19th century ancestor, Thaddeus Cahill´s living room-sized, 200 ton Telharmonium. Cahill´s idea was to create a machine on which music could be played and distributed through the phone lines to homes and businesses. His company went bankrupt with the advent of the phonograph, but his ideas seem oddly prescient of the way music is distributed in today's world of global computer networks.

When I started to prepare the music for recording, I felt I needed to expand it to make it work as a standalone piece. Originally I´d recorded the music with a string quartet and this is how we performed the work at first. I knew the music needed a richer, more elaborate sound, so I decided to orchestrate it for a large string orchestra. I also added a new section at the end of the piece. I had written some music based on a Dorothy Parker poem, "Two Volume Novel". I´d always loved this poem, it´s four simple lines somehow saying everything about the pain of love and I also felt it resonated strongly with "Odi et amo", Catullus' famous poem which I´d set to music on my album "Englabörn". Two epigrams separated by a couple of thousand years, yet saying much the same thing. Both put to music using strings and machine voices.

It seemed perfect as a final section. After all, the goal of Alan Turing's famous "imitation game" was originally not to distinguish man from machine, but man from woman.