Múm: Poison Ivy and Marmalade

Múm (pronounced “moom”) hails from Iceland. Formed in 1997 by Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Smárason, they were joined by twin sisters Gyöa and Kristín Valtýsdóttir.

Samuel Palmer

Múm’s fourth album, Go Go Smear Poison Ivy, released in 2007, exerts a perplexing hold on me. Characterized by soft vocals, eccentric beats and colourful effects, their sounds are produced from a variety of traditional and unconventional instruments. Incorporating harp, horn, clicks, reeds, bells and strings, the instrumentation is lush, hypnotic and multi-layered. Backed by an ensemble of hired musicians, their sounds intertwine lyrics with ambient multi-faceted instrumentation to construct a radiant, light-filled soundscape. It reinforces their reputation for producing dreamy lush electronic giving their music a refreshing unpredictability.

 

Described variously as electronic rock or experimental pop, Múm’s orchestration consistently takes the listener on a journey to another world. Go Go Smear Poison Ivy continues in this vein, the first release since the departure of Kristín Valtýsdóttir (her sister Gyöa left in 2002). The album’s sound does not represent a huge departure from their previous outings, but without Kristín Valtýsdóttir’s elfin-like vocals, Go Go Smear Poison Ivy is different enough to make one entertain the thought that this album is easily and possibly their best date. With two vocalists, Hildur Guonadóttir and Mr. Silla, the changes are dramatic enough to be noticed.

 

Over the course of the album, Múm takes the listener on a journey as far as the listener’s imagination will allow. Go Go Smear Poison Ivy starts with Blessed Brambles. It is possibly the longest track in the album, setting the tone of the album and prepares the listener for an other-worldly journey where fantasy and surrealism is allowed to reign. It also makes it quite clear that this is a very different Múm sound from previous excursions. But I am writing this because I’m trying to figure how why I have developed a particular fondness for the enticing Marmalade Fires. With is gently rolling melody, sprightly distorted beats, it is an undeniably a charming and cheerful sound.

 

My encounter with Múm and Marmalade Fires occurred through a happy coincidence. An acquaintance of mine was amused at my Sigur Rós obsession, along with my developing tastes for the music hailing from Scandinavia, in particular Iceland, and helpfully suggested that it might be worth my while sampling other similar sounds. His advice was that this meander round other soundscapes might prove not only healthy but useful as the last thing I would want is to fall out of love with Sigur Rós. He indicated that he spoke from experience as, apparently, this had happened with his earlier obsession with Moby. And yet, after several listening and without wanting to state the obvious, despite its instrumental prowess and stylings, Múm obviously isn’t Sigur Rós, and it would be unfair of me to expect them to render me speechless in the same way Sigur Rós does.

 

But Múm has got under my skin, especially Marmalade Fires. I’ve been playing that particular tune repeatedly for the past week; I can’t seem to leave it alone, which has now left me wondering about this current obsession. It is truly a charmingly cheerful tune. Relentlessly so.

 

This song getting under my skin leaves me perturbed. I find this inexplicable. Marmalade Fires is undeniably jaunty, innocently simple in its celebration of pleasurable melodic beats, seemingly inviting us to celebrate the sensory pleasures in life. It sweeps the listener into a swirl of happy nostalgic reminiscence. But the invitation to wallow in this pleasurable Proustian state increases my suspicion about my unfathomable obsession, hardening my resolve to dig beneath the surface of my repeated listenings.

 

All these thoughts ran through my head as I returned to Múm again today. It now dawns on me that Marmalade Fires has me thinking about the nature of happiness.

 

The conception of happiness has been obscured by our consumer based economy but now that the global economy and the political framework are in peril, the excesses of our buy-it-now, pay-for-it-later consumerist lifestyle is being shaken. And the conception of happiness commonly conceived as one which can be achieved through immediate gratification is put into question. Is happiness the same as the good life? Different cultures have varying standards by which to judge whether someone is happy or not. If one can be wrong about whether one is happy or not, then it follows that there may be an objective part of happiness. What is the relation between contentment and happiness? Does one entail the other or they mutually exclusive? Is happiness a psychological state? Or is there more to being happy than just thinking you’re happy? Is happiness a way of life? Well, this was the line of thought Marmalade Fires has set me on anyway. And as I tug away at my odd response to Marmalade Fires, I realise there is no better time than now to return to Aristotle to rethink what it means to be happy.

Aristotle

 

Our modern notion of happiness usually refers to a transitory elevated mood or feeling. Aristotle, by contrast, defined eudaimonia, or happiness, as “the best possible life”. And no doubt, it could be argued that this informs our understanding of what it means to be happy. But Aristotle approached the idea of happiness (eudaimonia) from an understanding that “what is good for man” must begin with understanding what it means to be “man” (ergon) and what is “correct and proper” for man.

 

At the same time, Aristotle writes, “And as much as they claim at living well, they seek bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth”. Aristotle understands man has having an infinite and unquenchable desire for wealth and to consume. In Politics, Aristotle argues that the unlimited desire to consume for the sake of mere living typically assumes a certain picture of good living, a life of unquenchable cheer and happiness, “And as much as they claim at living well, they seek after bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth”. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle calls such gratification “the pleasure from gain” (Book V, Chapter 2). And on these terms, such a pleasure-focused life promises to be free from suffering; it might seem to offer the same insulation against fate that mere living does.

 

I realise now what has been troubling me about Marmalade Fires. While sweetly cheerful, the sweet happiness promised by the sonic and aural pleasures of Marmalade Fires – a life of wallowing in enjoyment has inevitably awakened my innate scepticism. This easily gained pleasure and the model of life as readily available enjoyment seem a transitory one. Described by Aristotle, the life of enjoyment is not one somebody can immediately lead. Rather, it is a process that can never be fully sated. In other words, Aristotle warns us that pursuing the life of readily available enjoyment is a life where the priorities are wrong. Neither the unlimited pursuit of things, nor its use in a life wholly devoted to bodily pleasure grants sufficient weight to fulfilling our key capacities. For Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness and ethical action go together and the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of an ethical responsibility to welcome forms of otherness and difference. At best, a life of pursuing bodily and sensory enjoyment treats our capacities as a purely instrumental means of pursuing yet more stuff and more sensory pleasures.

Movies: On favourites and obsessions Part 1

Our favourite movies are never shown out of competitions at Cannes or the London Film Festival. They are the ones that have you hopping beside yourself, waiting impatiently for the special edition DVD box sets to be made available for your private delight and entertainment. They are the ones which become your guilty pleasure. The ones you always recommend to a friend and lover when you are asked what film he should watch and you cannot, you simply cannot believe it when he admits he has never watched or even heard of this movie that you’ve loved all your life. They are the ones that if someone told you they didn’t understand their appeal, it occurs to you that their refusal to understand is simply incomprehensible, a wilful obstinacy on their part, and the tempting thought surfaces unbidden:  you would love to terminate the friendship right there on the spot. They are the ones that make you feel that those on the screen will always remain with you, their fables and struggles always identifiable with yours, and that they are always right there to remind you about life’s lessons.   

Our favourite movies are the ones that explode through the doors of perception, rendering all that you once thought familiar strange, the once comforting turned utterly topsy-turvy and the strait-jacketed moral compass rendered askew. And didn’t you eagerly welcome their wild explosive entry into your world. Nothing remained the same after you welcome them into your life. They become the very fabric of your being, an element of your essence. You learn from them, your masters, understanding how to see the world otherwise. You welcome this.

You gradually build a memory palace to house your beloved favourites. It gradually becomes a repository, housing all those you secretly and obsessively hold dear to your heart. You begin to realise that your favourites, who remain forever unchanged and always with you, share an easy familiarity. You start noticing family resemblances. They have that stranger wildness, a quixotic complexity and intensity that is cultivated from gazing upon a world obsessively cataloguing it in all its banality and contrary wonder.  A leit motifemerges. Not a single one of these occupants are interested in the rational or the social universe belonging to the respectable world of suburbia. They are not tame.

Memory palace in an alchemical illustration

They share an obsessive thrill in documenting the lurid, burlesque, baroque and deviant excesses of human life in all its wondrous glory. Their movies howl upwards with enraged wildness, angered at witnessing the indignities that man is capable of. Their oeuvre betrays how hell bent they are on relentlessly erasing the fine line between cinematic fiction and lived ‘reality’. Yet, in spite of outward appearances, under all that carefully cultivated bravado, this lot combine visionary intensity with old-fashioned humanism, “Le plus terrible dans ce monde c’est que chacun a ses raison”. And in an increasingly cynical anaemic world, you love them. You truly, madly, deeply love them for wearing their naked hearts on their sleeves.

And who are this lot, the singular ones who share these strange family resemblances? You know them. They are David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, Roman Polanski, Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell, John Waters, Lars Von Triers, Jan Svankmajer, Kubrick and Oshima Nagisa, to name but a few. 

To be continued…..

Of Animals and Flowers: thoughts on Animal Collective

Svankmejer's Alice

Animal Collective is a music collective of avant-garde musicians from Baltimore, Maryland. Records released under the name Animal Collective may include contributions from any or all of these members; the line-up is not uniform. The band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age.

 

Comprising Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb), and Geologist (Brian Weitz), Animal Collective are the Peter Pans of indie-rock. Four thirty-somethings from Baltimore, whose stage names betray their regard for childhood, have made eight albums of head-spinning pop which evoke the fleeting highs and dreams of pre-pubescence where life seemingly stretches out with endless possibilities.

Although the band is sometimes classified as psych folk, indie-rock or noise rock, it is hard to define the Animal Collective sound as they often experiment with diverse styles and ideas from album to album. The group also runs Paw Tracks on which they have released their own material as well as material by artists such as Ariel Pink, Terrestrial Tones, and The Peppermints. 

 By all accounts, their ninth album is a dizzying knees-up that makes most music sound bloodless, common-or-garden and pathetically timid. Certainly, their eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion is exuberant, informed by an ecstatic boundless joy that surges ever forward, seemingly attempting to break the boundaries that encloses the everyday, and judging from the explosive opener in the In the Flowers, wherein Avey Tare’s incantation makes a plea for a temporary respite, “If I could just leave my body for the night”.

In the Flowers begins with a vision; Avey Tare is on his way home when he spies a boy, stoned and care free, dancing in a field. Responding as if he has stumbled across an alien scene, this spectacle renders him unable to respond to the dancer’s joy. Tare, it seems, simply cannot reconcile his own sadness with an embodied space, now made alien by another’s exuberant expression. Witnessing this scene, Tare’s rapturous incantation, “If I could just my body for the night” is perhaps a plaintive cry for another space, a cry to be shown the pathway to becoming otherwise, no matter how temporary. Tare consoles himself, now seeing the dance anew: “Then we could  be dancing no more missing you while I am gone / Then we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song / And then ours would meet them we will recognise nothing’s wrong”. Here, In the Flowers, we find the choice made wherein Avey Tare chooses empathy instead of opting for jealousy and bitterness.  

Overall, Animal Collective’s instrumentation pushes the listener through the prism of the familiar into a world made strange. Such are their tactics of de-familiarisation that we are inexorably pushed through the rabbit-hole, coming up on the other side to a lush sonic landscape made anew. Forced into their world, we witness the seemingly banal re-made ecstatic and marvellous through the prism of aural love.  Even Summertime Clothes, a rapturous piece, is anchored in a seething electronic reef seeking to break the conventions of everyday (pop) sensibility.

The currency of hype, often the elephant in the room, is difficult to schematize, but it roughly equates to word-of-mouth, plus the apparatuses of journalism. Throw into this mix the special x-factor. Most bands associated with the h-word have x-factors that involve an aggregate of various extra-musical marginalia, fashions, back-stories, and unifying visual aesthetics. This is the stuff that musical journalists use to fatten their paragraphs and self-aggrandize their profession. Animal Collective dropped most of their shtick when they stopped wearing masks. Their x-factor is a rare one: they make fantastic, unique, relentless singular records with a regularity that suggests an enchanted acumen.

 And while it is misleading to impose a trajectory to the evolution of a band, Animal Collective has always resisted aesthetic stasis, easy compartmentalization or the readily formulaic and banal. Every subsequent offering from Animal Collective has been a re-imagination of its own sound-craft and song-craft. Merriweather Post Pavilion is easily their most lyrical and accessible, offering a diverse catalogue of sounds in a sonic language that soars every upwards, defying gravity and easy definitions. 

 For Animal Collective, their shtick is simply a quest for another way to carving out sounds. For them, music is not an end in itself but a medium, a portal towards something bewildering and obscure.  

Time will of course tell if Animal Collective lives up to their sonic ambitions of capturing myriad treasures. But for now, we can simply lie back and witness an ecstatic dancing and pulsing of sounds.

 

My Sigur Ros obsession

Recently compelled to re-visit a past obsession, for that is what listening  to Sigur Ros has provoked in me, an obsession bordering on the obsessive-compulsive, I wondered if the time has come to finally comprehend what draws me irrevocably to Sigur Ros. Yes, it is an obsession because listening to Sigur Ros is a guilty pleasure as I once was a true believer of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits and Mark E Smith. Everything in my sonic universe gravitated around the pull of this triumvirate. So, I ask myself, what is it this pull that Sigur Ros exerts on me? Short answer: I ached for something other. And Sigur Ros truly represents an Otherness in my sonic universe.

Sigur Rós has often been categorised as an Icelandic post-rock band. The name is derived from the name of lead vocalist Jónsi Birgisson’s little sister Sigurrós. According to their website, it is pronounced “si-ur roas (as in roast).” They hail from the same creative and vibrant Icelandic music scene as múm and Amiina. They released their first ever foray into film-making with their tour documentary, Heima in late 2007. But to categorise them as post-rock is too easy, a readily made short-hand used by those music journos.

Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, Takk and in particular to Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, I am transported gracefully by the breathtaking orchestration to a sensuous tonal landscape, seeped with quixotic melancholy and boundless joy. Here in this space I encounter an otherness. They make their instruments cry, coaxing sounds that are utterly other. This alien otherworldly landscape confounds description and without the usual bearings provided by the emotional compass of Tom Waits and The Fall, co-ordinates with which I have become familiar, I find myself bereft for words. The easy descriptions are, of course, too easy. The obvious motifs evoke blissfully, ethereal moments. Oh yes, it would be too easy to succumb to such descriptions, a cop-out even. Their musical inventions start small, with gentle coos and keyboard tinkering, then build and build until they’re cascading and tumbling over each other, high and alive somewhere overhead, inflated by ambitious instrumentation that could tear you to pieces and then pick you up and put you back together.

Their instrumentation tempts you to stare skywards, making you want to contemplate the vastness of the human spirit, believing that it is perfectly within our grasp to capture the music of the spheres. Arranged just so, their sounds encourage the breath to come alive, soaring, peaking and then weeping. The landscape their orchestration lays out before us is magnificent. And heartbreaking. Pulling us away from life, and yet, yet somehow managing to make life seem more meaningful. With strings, horns, piano and operatic cries, Sigur Ros show us the world made strange, but it is a world as we, or is it I, would like to see it.
 
 
To listen to Sigur Ros is to feel joy and the faint stirrings of something once thought long-lost found again. Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur makes it almost possible to believe. I find this quite confounding. How does it go? Credo quia impossible est, “I believe it because it is impossible”. I can’t listen to Sigur Ros without hearing the faint voice from my past reminding me of these words again. And yet, Sigur Ros’ orchestration encourages the temptation to slip away from the world as it is. But in the increasingly harsh world, some strange fragile beauty persists. Listening to Sigur Ros gently reminds me of this, making me wonder again, and affords a glimpse of a possibility to another way of being in and with the world. Because, as Angela Bassett says in Strange Days, “Memories were meant to fade, they were designed that way, this is your life, right here, right now”.