New Musical Express April 2002

Interview by Ian Watson.

múm

Skewed underwater electronica from Iceland.

When Gunnar Örn Tynes was small he had na imaginary friend. He was much cleverer than Gunnar and sat on his shoulder while they had bizarre adventures. He also happened to be a small dragon. "I didn't realise it was strange that he was a dragon," smiles Gunnar, sitting whith his Icelandic bandmates (Örvar Póreyjarson Smárason and twin sisters Kristín Anna and Gyda Valtýsdóttir) in Hyde Park. "It was quite normal then."
Translate thi slightly skewed take on the joys and oddities of childhood into sparkling electronica and you have múm. Their first album, "Yesterday was dramatic, today is ok", was a fragile, beautiful piece of laptop orchestration that the quartet think of as "morning. Sunny. Bicycling". Their new single "green grass of tunnel" and album, "Finally we are no one", is darker, spookier, "a bit later in the day".
"Electronic music is often moodsetting but our music is more like storytelling." Explains Örvar. He admits múm are "childish people, naive maybe" and says they write music to escape to a simpler world. "Now there's that fear again", for example, is about "someone escaping from something on a bike and jumping from a bridge into a river and floating away". A suicide? "No, we would never write about that!" A release then. "Yes, but sad."
Kristín Anna and Gyda agreed to appear on the cover of Belle & Sebastian's "Fold you Hands Child…" after meeting Stuart Murdoch at the Bowlie Weekender. Gyda says she finds joy in their music. Örvar thinks they're sad. "Yes." She agrees. "A sad joy."
múm are infused with sad joy. An enquiry about their happiest childhood memory prompts Gunnar to talk about his dragon and Gyda to fall deathly silent. In Iceland, they play their music underwater.
"Sound is different in water than air," says Gunnar. "It's hard getting bass and the treble is magical. If you swim over it you feel it. These songs aren't complete until you hear them underwater."
Of course.


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