The places we’ve travelled to, the people we met, the food we ate — all that stuff influences us: Iceland’s Múm
DETAILS
Watching Heima, the fantastic concert film released by Sigur Rós in 2007, it’s hard not to be struck by the stunning settings of their native Iceland, the collaborative spirit of the band’s musical community and the awesome wool sweaters everyone is wearing. As such, it makes sense that their peers in the experimental pop band múm have maintained a sense of childlike awe since its inception in the early aughts, transporting listeners somewhere equally removed from the rest of the world.
This August saw the release of múm’s fifth full-length album, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, its second effort following the departure of frontwoman Kristín Anna (now recording solo as Kria Brekkan and with her husband Avey Tare of Animal Collective). Simultaneously playful and pastoral, the album is full of the unusual instrumentation, found-sound field samples and naive vocals múm is known for while also marking the latest development in their musical mutation.
“We’ve changed with every single album we’ve made, and there have been big lineup changes for all of them,” explains founding member Örvar Smárason, competing with an opening band’s noisy sound check over a crackling cellphone in Philadelphia. “I think that’s just the way we do it — it’s the most creative process. We’re an open group and the path to creativity can’t exist when you’re always the same entity.”
Back home, Smárason is known not only as a musician, but also as an acclaimed author-poet. The year 2005 saw the publishing of both his poetry collection, Gamall þrjótur, nýjir tímar (‘Old villain, new times’), and Úfin, strokin (‘Ruffled, stroked’), described as “a detective boy novel updated for modern girls.” An Aphex Twin fan and former student of the screenwriting program at Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU for short), it would be an understatement to say that he approaches music from a unique vantage point.
“We don’t sense inspiration very much, but there are some obvious themes like language and water that I think about when I listen to the new album,” Smárason says. “Maybe the places we’ve travelled to, the people we met, the food we ate, the books we read, the films we saw and the music we heard — all that stuff influences us. I could start listing off artists, but then I feel like I’d be lying to you and I want to be honest.”
Following past performances of live, improvised scores for films such as Nosferatu, Pandora’s Box and Un Chien Andalou, múm gained its one and only commonality with the Pet Shop Boys when, like that British duo, it penned an original soundtrack for the Sergei Eisenstein classic Battleship Potemkin, performing it in Spain, New York and Iceland.
“Those other films were more about the music because they’re more theory-based, but Potemkin was different because it’s so rhythmic in such a specific way,” Smárason explains. “Since there are so many difficult scenes and camera moves in it, it was one of the most challenging projects we’ve ever done.”
On top of cinema, the band is also passionate about social action, though it’s thankfully far removed from U2-style smugness. Ten per cent of all sales from Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know go straight to Refugees United (refunite.org), and in a past blog post, the band described its involvement in the 2005 festival Low Tide in Town, protesting the demolition of downtown Reykjavik. While the band expressed its disappointment that these efforts were not fully successful, the economic downturn now seems to have provided temporarily positive results.
“Contractors in Reykjavik have bought most of the downtown and they want to tear everything down and build shopping malls,” says Smárason. “It’s really horrible. They leave everything empty until it starts to crumble, so there are all of these old houses that can’t be lived in or rebuilt.”
“When the economy in Iceland collapsed, the plans for the shopping malls were put on hold as well,” he continues. “Some houses were demolished, but some were actually saved. Still, it’s sort of like a pause in the battle, but it’s not like anything has really changed. It’s great we could come together as musicians to protest, yet it’s a difficult fight because the contractors have so much money and so much power.”
Originally, the band’s use of field samples was birthed by necessity, as the only “instruments” they could afford to make beats with for their sampler were cutlery and the sound of closing doors. These days, it’s a fundamental element of their naturalist esthetic and remains an exciting avenue to explore.
“During the recording of our last album, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, I was studying in Prague and doing film cut-up stuff, so a lot of that ended up on the songs,” Smárason says. “The new album includes my parent’s parrot singing, a fireplace we were recording near in Estonia and an old lady giving us chocolate. We credited the parrot in the album credits but not the old lady. Maybe we should send her a copy.”
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)