Friendship Survival Guide Sees Adam Wiltzie Complete a Decade-Old Collaboration with the Late Jóhann Jóhannsson
Legendary ambient drone artist Adam Wiltzie salutes his longtime friend, the award-winning composer Jóhann Jóhannsson by finishing the album the pair started in 2013
Additional contributions to Friendship Survival Guide come from electronic musician Tim Hecker, the late producer Steve Albini and Grammy Award winning engineer, Francesco Donadello
The album will be released on 18 September 2026,
listen to the first pre-release single White Gloves & Turtlenecks here.
“Our friendship is the story here, (…) Jóhann’s not there anymore, but this artifact we created together, is alive and it’s incredible. I could never have done it without him.“ – Adam Wiltzie
DG releases crystal-clear vinyl reissue of Jóhannsson’s celebrated Orphée for its 10th anniversary,
out 16 October
On September 18th‚ Deutsche Grammophon will release Friendship Survival Guide, an album of orchestral psychedelic drone compositions by Adam Wiltzie and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. Wiltzie, co-founder of the now-legendary drone duo Stars of the Lid, and Jóhannsson, the award-winning composer and orchestrator, shared a decade-long friendship and creative partnership, writing, performing and recording together prior to the latter’s tragic passing in 2018. Friendship Survival Guide stems from the pair’s numerous 2013–17 studio collaborations on sessions for Jóhannsson’s scores of the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (for which Jóhann won a Golden Globe) and director Dennis Villeneuve’s 2017 sci-fi thriller Arrival (for which he garnered an Academy Award nomination). The album will be available digitally, on CD and on black vinyl. Ahead of its release, two digital singles will be issued for streaming and download: White Gloves & Turtlenecks, out today, July 31, followed by Dazed And Reflective Glory – Pt.1 on September 4.
After years away from the recordings, Wiltzie returned to the tapes with blessings from Jóhannsson’s family, completing Friendship Survival Guide to honor Jóhann’s legacy. Some of these tracks—and the analog tape loops that form their core—remain as they were first recorded a decade ago by the pair’s longtime friend and engineer Francesco Donadello, using Jóhann’s Revox machines. Other Friendship Survival Guide pieces required additional recording that took place between 2023–25, with Wiltzie assisted by electronic musician Tim Hecker and composer Bryan Senti. Many of the guitar tracks on Friendship Survival Guide were, in Wiltzie’s words, “recorded, blasted and amped” by engineer/producer Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, months before his own sudden passing. The musical ghosts that permeate these recordings are staggering to behold.
Yet so is the camaraderie and creative love that informs the album and its name. As he often does with all his projects, Wiltzie gave original titles to the pieces at the end of the recording process, supplying them with “hidden meanings.” The titles on Friendship Survival Guide “anchor the sound in our recognizable friendship” and “function as a private language between the collaborators.” For insight into how close Wiltize and Jóhannsson were, look no further than the layered, starts-in-the-middle orchestral beauty of the opener, “September Nineteen Sixty Nine,” named after the month both men were born in, two days and an ocean apart.
The pair first met in 2007 in Prague, where Jóhannsson was recording parts of his soon-to-be-released, Fordlandia, making the leap from the Icelandic shoegaze punk underground to the expansive, string-laden sound that would make him a global sensation. He’d come to see Wiltzie’s storied band, Stars of the Lid, then in the midst of a European tour, and introduced himself at the merch table. The pair went out drinking with friends that night, instantly bonding around similar lives and interests, and around shared musical aesthetics, ambient synths, orchestral grandeur, lo-fi tape loops and how various drones intermingle effortlessly. Wiltzie remembers the evening as a “first-night-on-Earth-type meeting, two guys who just met but seemed like we’d known each other our entire lives.”
Over the next decade, Wiltzie and Jóhannsson collaborated regularly. In 2009, Wiltzie helped book and tour manage Jóhannsson’s first (very DIY) tour of the U.S, and Adam would remain a regular part of Jóhann’s live band, and his live sound engineer, even as he also continued working on solo music, and launched the duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Dustin O’Halloran. In 2013, Jóhannsson invited Wiltzie to ghost-write and collaborate on the cues to the score for the James Marsh film, The Theory of Everything, the first time they’d written and recorded together. Working in separate studios—Jóhannsson in Berlin, Wiltzie from his home in Belgium—the collaboration was a “back-and-forth, super-easy and quick. He loved it, and I loved what he was sending back.” Wiltzie called the time “very inspiring and creative” for both men, and “the catalyst for the idea of recording an album together.” They began recording what Jóhannsson called “our own weird record” right there and then; but before long, the Theory score won those Hollywood awards, and Jóhannsson’s career went, in Wiltzie’s words, “skyrocket to the moon,” pushing their album idea onto the back-burner.
Yet the pair’s friendship never receded. Wiltzie recalls the last of his regular check-in phone calls with Jóhannsson, shortly before Jóhann’s passing in February 2018: “He had just played a concert in Barcelona, and was sounding calm and lucid. I was so happy for him because he had a great show. He said, he wished he could do more shows like this, because it felt so good to be on stage.’ He was having a really good day, and seemed in a really good place. And then he was gone.”
Speaking of Friendship Survival Guide, Wiltzie says: “Our friendship is the story here, that one half of the duo is not around anymore, that he was a good friend of mine, and I’m still dealing with his loss. At the same time, it feels great to be finishing this music. Because you can feel Jóhann’s presence. It’s this living, breathing thing, a beautiful reminder. The quintessentially most perfect and beautiful thing about collaboration is that it’s something you could never do by yourself. It’s as simple as that. Jóhann’s not there anymore, but this artifact we created together, is alive and it’s incredible. I could never have done it without him.”
(For more of Adam Wiltzie discussing his relationship with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Friendship Survival Guide, read the full as-told-to text, culled from an interview with Piotr Orlov.)
Alongside the release of Friendship Survival Guide, September 18th will also see the release of an accompanying three-chapter short film by Belgian director Jonas Govaerts. Starring Wiltzie and the actor Jeroen Percevall (Bullhead), the film can be best described as a metaphysical nocturnal taxi ride, a visual (non-documentary) companion to the album, with scenes shot in a Gent studio and a bleak train station in Muizen.
The album’s release date, September 18, also marks the pre-order start for the crystal-clear vinyl reissue of Orphée, one of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s most successful albums celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2026. The special edition will be released shortly afterwards, on October 16.
Upcoming live performances of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music will take place at the Vancouver International Film Festival (Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, BC,10/9/2026), featuring an orchestra playing to film clips of Prisoners, Arrival, Sicario, and The Theory of Everything; and at the Ambient Festival Cologne 2027 (location/date TBC), where Ensemble Musikfabrik will perform “Drone Mass.”
Upcoming North American live dates for A Winged Victory For the Sullen include Vic Theatre in Chicago (9/23/2026), The Concert Hall in Toronto (9/25/2026), Pop Montréal (9/26/2026), and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn (9/28 & 9/29/2026).
