Iceland's múm are at the Cutting Edge of Cool
From the Land of the Ice and Snow
With their dreamy-yet-unnerving sounds and surreal visuals, múm are at the cutting edge of Icelandic cool
Múm’s quirky, artistic music videos are an integral part of their repertoire. The band have worked with a variety of video artists to create moving-image accompaniment to their elfin arrangements. Incorporating both Icelandic iconography and surreal fantasy tropes, they range widely in imagery from funhouse mirrors to goats to stop-motion graphic drawings.
Reached just before a sound check in Toronto last week, múm lead singer/guitarist Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason discussed how the varied video artists used for the band’s songs are selected. Conscious of the potential for syrupy arrangements, múm seem to make a concerted effort to incorporate a bit of the ugly and perplexing into their works.
“Since we come up with a theme and let the artist take off with it, it’s very important that there is a certain friction, to create nuances between the music and the videos,” Smárason said. “It can’t be too sweet, and there are actually a few múm videos that have never seen the light of day because the melding of music and visuals felt too saccharine.”
This not-too-sweet formula also pervades the music of múm (which, according to their publicist, “rhymes with ‘gloom’ and ‘doom’”). Two years after the release of their fourth album, the eccentric Scandinavian pop maestros are touring to support their new Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. Quieter and a bit more morose than the band’s prior output, Sing Along’s songs fluidly sample, layer and re-configure sounds using a wealth of subtle methods and noisemaking techniques. From the complicated (computer sequencing, a full choir and studio mix tricks) to the quotidian (Smárason’s parents’ parakeet, a half-full pot of water and a xylophone), múm draw on many different sources for musical sounds and ideas.
“We don’t really dissect what influences what in our music,” Smárason states. “Nature and our surroundings have a lot to do with the sound, but that’s not the overarching theme of this record. And though there are some elements that are specifically Icelandic, like traditional folk and pop music from the ’50s and ’60s, we look to all kinds of music for inspiration.”
Fellow Icelanders Elly Vilhjálmsdóttir and Magnus Blondal Jóhannsson seem especially influential in múm’s songs, as do the Sugarcubes (of course) and the generation of similar artists popular in the late ’80s. Using a lot of piano, guitar, bass and drums, múm also deliver the kalimba, ukulele, marimba and vibraphone to their sonic tapestry. The current tour includes the two founding members, with Smárason on guitar and Gunnar Örn Tynes on bass, and the lineup is expanded to include friends Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson (trumpet/piano/keyboards), Hildur Guðnadóttir (cello/vocals), Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (vocals/ukulele/percussion), Róbert Reynisson (guitar/ukulele) and Samuli Kosminen (drums/percussion).
In the past, water has been a crucial component to múm’s music: Liquid noises show up frequently in recordings, the band staged the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic Battleship Potemkin at both the Brooklyn Lyceum and Spain’s Gijon Film Festival, and they also once performed at an Icelandic public pool and used underwater speakers so listeners had to be submerged to hear anything. This time around, múm’s members assert in their press kit that the new record is “an ode to the light in its different shapes . . . from a fading bulb to the blinding sun.”
These distinctive shades of light (and dark) are evident in the haunting melodies and mesmerizing rhythms of the new album, where those paying attention can deconstruct the complex layering of musical artistry . . . or simply enjoy a winding path paved in an assortment of intellectual fairy dust.
múm play with Sin Fang Bous at the Yost TheaterTh, 307 Spurgeon St., Santa Ana, (888) 862-9573.
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