Interview: Múm
I love Icelandic experimental band Múm, though their music is impossible to classify — sometimes obscure and minimal, other times sweet and almost with a pop music quality. It’s filled with personality and vigor, as well as brains. At the center of the band is the team of Örvar Smárason and Gunnar Örn Tynes, with various musical partners since the band’s inception in 1998. Their latest album is “Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know.” Along with putting out albums, they’ve also scored silent movies and performed underwater.
What follows is the interview as conducted via email - not my preferred method of interviewing, but it does give a good indication of the attitude and humor of the band:
J: What was the evolution of your sound originally? How much did you have to experiment with mixing “real” instruments with electronic sounds before you settled into a combination that sounded right for you?
O: I think we have never settled into a combination of anything and listening to the albums, you hear that there is different instrumentation on every album we have made. The evolution of our sound has never been linear, nor should it be. We have no hopes of reaching some “final destination” with what we do.
J: How do you think your music has changed since 1998 - what have you added to it and what has disappeared from it?
O: We never make the same album twice and we rarely write the same song twice. People have come and gone, everything has had it’s twists and turns.
J: What is the typical evolution of a song? What is the process of
collaboration for the band?
O: We don’t really have a preferred process of making music. It has much more to do with just turning on the faucet and letting it flow.
J: What are Gunnar and Orvar’s separate musical backgrounds and how did they come to work together?
M: Neither of us had any proper musical background, we were pretty much just doodlers. We met in a another band that our friend was putting together called Andheri, where I sang and played guitar and Gunni was the bass player.
J: How does Iceland manifest itself in your music?
M: That’s an impossible question for us to answer, as artists and musicians we don’t really analyze our work much. We create.
J: In regard to Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know - the album was recorded in various locations - what sorts of settings
did you work in and why did you choose those? What did each location lend to the music?
O: We go to write and record in new places to enjoy their beauty and to relax in a different environment, basically to put ourselves in a situation where creating is effortless. We recorded a lot of this album in a cabin thats about an hours drive from Reykjavik. We also spent a week in an amazing house in Estonia, a 14th century wooden manor surrounded by hundreds of lakes. And other places. What each place lent to the music, I don’t know.
J: You use a lot of different instruments on this album - do you have certain instruments in mind to use with certain songs or do you choose through a process of experimentation and playing? What do you like best about ukuleles?
O: The best thing about ukuleles is how small they are. Like tiny guitars. Anyway, new instruments are very often the starting point of a new song, when you have something you haven’t experimented with before, there is more space to create brand spanking new things and ideas. I hope there is an endless world of new instruments out there, because we don’t feel ready to stop.
J: Tell me about your parrot and how it got involved with the recording.
O: I was watching my parents parrot for a while and it was pointless to try and exclude him when I was making recordings. Most of his parts came when I was recording piano at my parents house, he likes the sound of a piano and would sing when I hit the keys.
J: The new album is very sweet and personable, and it seems like a departure from some of your previous work - do you feel the same way about it?
O: Not really, I feel like we made the departure when we started this band and since then it has been one long pointless journey.
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