Time Out New York July 2002

Interview by Jay Ruttenberg.

Underwater Mum light

Iceland's organica quartet Mum fishes for sounds in unlikely places.

Orvar Poreyjarson Smarason stands in at the foot of a driveway in suburban New York, staring at the van in which his band, Mum, is about to crisscross America for the first time. He is fretting that the vehicle - fat with accordion, glockenspiel, Wurlitzer and laptops- will be unable to accommodate the group's cello. never mind the group's cellist.

The Icelandic band, currently staying at the Mount Vernon headquarters of its U.S. label, Bubblecore, has surmounted far more tangled transport puzzles in the past. For one thing, Smarason and his girlfriend, singer Kristin Anna Valtysdottir, recently moved to Berlin, commuting to their native Reykjavik for band practice. And this band practices in some unconventional garages. "We had a lot of idea for our album," Smarason says of the new Finally We are No One, the band's second. "So we went to a lighthouse to finalize work on it. We used a helicopter to fly our equipment over." But upon returning from the lighthouse, "We had to pass [the instruments] to drunken sailors and send them out in a finishing boat," adds Valtysdottir, her head flopped affectionately a top her bandmate's shoulder.

Though inebriated Popeyes will find nary a chantey on the resulting album, Mum's latest does evoke its lighthouse milieu. The computerized cackles of Mum's 2000 debut, Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today is OK, also resonate throughout the new work, only this time they're employed to illuminate the band's extensive reliance on natural sounds: acoustic instruments and the Tinker Bell singing of Valtysdottir and her sister, Gyda (both recognizable from their stint as Belle and Sebastian cover models). But perhaps the most prominent recurring sound in Mum's gently melancholic universe is that of trickled liquids, as if those tipsy sailors let the sea into the band's gear. "We have always drawn a lot of our samples from the natural world," says Gunnar Orn Tynes, who was playing music for a children's theatrical production along with Smarason when they first joined the Valtysdottir twins. "The lighthouse had a big effect on how we recorded this album, so it made a lot of sense to drum our fingers on the water, or band on a [submerged] pan, for percussion.

In fact, two new songs, "Behind Two Hills...A Swimming Pool" and "Faraway Swimming Pool," were recorded specifically for underwater listening sessions. The songs - which sound something like Brian Eno scoring A.I - are a result of the band's experiments which "swimming pool concerts" for which Mm and other musicians convinced the city of Reykjavik to purchase underwater speakers, then performed shows in which listeners could hear the music only while swimming. "Music sounds differently in the water," Smarason says, "It doesn't have a lot of bass, but it is very clear. If you swim away from the speaker, the sound is just as strong as if you're close to it. We tried to capture that feeling on the album, making frequencies that are extremely shimmering in the water."

While the NEA is unlikely to bedeck our nation's pools with underwater speakers, the band's New York debut finds Mum playing the Brooklyn Lyceum, a renovated bathhouse where the quartet will improvise to Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 film by Sergei Eisenstein. Celebrated for its breakthrough use of discontinuity editing, in which seemingly incongruous shots are juxtaposed to suggest mood and action, the Soviet picture seems a natural fit for Mum, whose own work prospers from a similar patchwork sensibility. On the best moments of Finally we are no one, percussion of mysterious origins stutters right beneath the surface while strings make maudlin sweeps and other sources - computers, keyboards, liquids - gurgle sporadically.

Isolated, these sounds amount to virtual nonsense; through Mum's amalgam, the picture becomes vivid. A seamless blend of the electronic and the organic, Finally We Are No On glimmers as a majestically picturesque beacon, in liquid on land.



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