Iceland is incredibly beautiful, a place of alien landscapes and sublime otherworldly beauty. The music from múm reflects that unearthly beauty. It is its source of inspiration.
For Örvar Smárason, “the preservation of Icelandic culture is important to us, but more important is the evolution of Icelandic culture. We have to be aware so we won’t drown ourselves in disposable crap and cheap shit and that our culture moves in a different direction. There is room for the old traditions and we need them, but we have to keep building.” Múm was formed in 1998 and has to date released numerous albums, several singles, remixes and soundtracks. Today only two of the founding members are left: Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Toreyjarson Smárason. This year, the musical collective releases its fifth studio creation Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, a collection of delicate, playful, strange magical compositions with intriguing titles.
The latest offerings from múm disclose their Icelandic heritage, always present in the sub-strata of their music. Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know is perhaps one of their best work to date.
The soundscapes múm meticulously construct emerge from traditional and non-traditional instruments, soft melodious vocals and experimental electronica. Gunnar Örn Tynes indicates, “Our songs are melancholy and emotive [...] I want to say that we are not sad persons [...], but we appreciate these sensations in the music or in the cinema, in any artistic form.”
With a replacement singer, sweet-flowing choruses are in abundance, along with swells of delicate and orchestrated melodies, but the crackling electronics have given way to more acoustic instruments and strings, even though electronic remnants can be heard throughout. The playfulness is still there as well, only now it’s supplied by ukulele and delicate piano tinkerings.
Gunnar Örn Tynes clearly recognizes that “the studio can be a very sterile environment sometimes, people can get very self-conscious, so we prefer to record in different places.” This may be the reason why the listener encounters in múm’s sonic landscapes a charming strangeness. Múm’s music can leave nobody indifferent, even to those who insist that they are far removed from their music. Just witness the strong reactions they provoke in certain music reviewers, for instance. Nonetheless, múm undeniably combines a harmonious mixture of trance inducing instrumentation and melodies with a soft, yet robust energy. With each of their composition, múm demonstrates their creative inventiveness along with their openness to experimentation, successfully combining analogue and digital technologies.
Of their music, Smárason indicates, “Sometimes it feels like escapist music; music for people to get away with. Sometimes it’s music that’s very slow and refers to some other world. It’s about the music connecting everybody to parts of themselves they don’t feel that often [...] We have done music for an opera, have set to music Icelandic poetry. Iceland is simply so small that everything must work with each other, even if they have quite different backgrounds.” “We have always drawn a lot of our samples from the natural world,” says Gunnar Örn Tynes.
Artfully moving between ethereal pop rhythms, electronic beat and sweet melancholy, múm creates sonic cathedrals: beautiful, organic and prone to sprout strange, alien tendrils of sound. Yet under the surface of this sonic sorcery, there is a melancholic undertow, a sense of sadness and undeniable loss washing over the tracks. Múm maps out an emotional terrain populated with dreams, miracles and bittersweet taste of irretrievable loss, bringing to mind those lines from Walt Whitman’s Halcyon Days
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
Overall, the bulk of the tracks in Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know are tastefully crafted, experimental pop songs with evocative, sometimes seductive singing, while the musicians explore the outer edges of chamber pop with wispy tones and textures. Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know is undeniably another fine example of how múm is evolving and continually expanding on their already diverse musical palette. It may require a few spins before the quaint peculiarities become charming, but eventually the album will evoke the feeling of waking up late with vague pensive memories.
