The Village Voice July 2002

Review by Piotr Orlov.



Battleship PowerBook

Brian Eno once made a case for turning the word pretentious into a compliment, arguing that artists need experimental leaps of faith into the highfalutin to achieve something new. Like many current Icelandic musicians, the two men and two women of the baroque-techno pop quartet mum make pretentious aspirations a raison d'etre. Alongside other members of Reykjavik's Kitchen collective, mum has recently turned its ambient gaze toward creating original soundtracks for classic silent films. Last Thursday, in the midst of an inaugural U.S. tour promoting its sophomore collection of pop tunes, Finally We Are No One, mum took a side trip to the warehouse-y confines of the Brooklyn Lyceum, to play along with a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 epic Battleship Potemkin.

In was an inspired pairing. Mum wears the notion of romantic IDM on its sleeve, mixing (among other things) a melodica, a harmonium, and two PowerBooks, piling sweet textures onto modernist crackles, like Belle and Sebastian at play in a Mac store. Eisenstein's mythic account of a 1905 mutiny on a Russian destroyer is equally up-front - sweeping strokes molding a then-new medium. Divided into five emotionally focused chapters, allowing the group to use its compositional ideas in short, connected stabs. Which mum did with aplomb, tying together a funeral cello-laptop dirge (the scene of Vakulinchuk's death), a militaristic techno march (the confrontation on the Odessa steps), and a music box-like soliloquy (the infamous baby-carriage scene) into a graceful musical tale. And the closing scene's coda, in which Potemkin races toward the Russian fleet, was an exploding variation on the Soviet anthem: digital feedback underneath cathedral organ chords, a battle-hymm for the humanist proletariat. Pretentious though it may have been, it was also a grand spectacle.



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