Mum - Mùm - The fable of folktronic pop

Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason has for over ten years been one of the leading figures in the musical adventure of Múm, whose warm, empathetic music, rich in electronic color, has moved through glitch, folktronica and pop, forging a dynamic, personal style that has been widely, if discreetly, imitated. “Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know” is the band’s fifth album, released in late August on Morr Music.

I meet Örvar in Milan, in a fairly central bar. He's sitting at an outdoor table, having just finished a caprese salad. After the introductions and a quick exchange about the mp3 recorder that refuses to work and the fact that in hyper-technological Japan everyone still uses cassette recorders, we chat briefly about “Scapigliato, lisciato”, the “very strange” book that Örvar has written and has come to present in Italy in these very days. Very kindly, Örvar gives me a copy.

Örvar speaks quietly, gently, with a Germanic accent that, together with his ash-blond hair and slender build, leaves little doubt as to where he's from.

You write and compose music. Are there common threads in your approach, ideas you try to express in both fields?

Yes, certainly, the creative drive comes from the same source. In both cases, it's about opening up, finding a state in which I can let thoughts flow, in an almost meditative way. The central element is poetry: whether it's music or literature, the two are still linked, they live in the same space.

So, an essentially instinctive approach…

…Yes, everything I do is absolutely non-intellectual, instinctive.

“Finally We Are No One” was released in both Icelandic and English; the subsequent albums, however, are all sung in English. What's the reason for this decision?

The Icelandic version of the record was mostly an experiment: we wanted to know whether Icelanders would be interested. Instead, the response in Iceland was that the two versions were exactly the same: the only people who particularly appreciated the Icelandic version were foreigners!

Our lyrics don't necessarily need to be understood; but if someone wants to, they should be able to. That's why we prefer English, even though it's not our language — we think it suits pop culture better.

On the latest album, the interplay between electronics and acoustic instrumentation is more intense than ever. Alongside this shift in elements, was there also a change in your approach to music?

The approach has been the same since we started making music, but the way we make it has evolved, which has to do as much with technical aspects as with simply maturing and experimenting, which leads to new places. Gunnar, who has played with me from the very beginning, and I started making electronic music around the age of 12, even before we had any conventional instruments; then, a few years later, we formed a rock band. When we later went back to electronic music, we realized that, in terms of approach, there was no distinction for us between the two things: we didn't say to ourselves "this is electronic", "this isn't". We kept evolving more and more in that direction, and while electronics certainly prevailed on the first album, now even for listeners it's no longer so easy to tell what's electronic and what isn't.

On the first album, though, the fusion is already very successful, to the point that I can't quite imagine what things were like before. What was the origin of your sound?

Well, at first for us it was all about tapes: even when we were making electronic music, we still had to record it onto cassette, and any editing we could do was basically tape music work. With our first album we were catapulted into a new world, that of computer recording, and from the very first day in the studio we started playing around and experimenting, making those techniques our own. We treated Pro Tools like a toy for something like half a year, and this is what came out of it!

Ah, Pro Tools… What other software do you use, and what electronic instruments do you use besides the computer?

We use a lot of old gear: Moog, Korg and other analog synthesizers. For programming, we now mainly use Ableton Live. We've been dealing with it since the very first version: we were living in Berlin and knew part of the team that was working on it, so we contributed to the beta-test. It keeps getting better, I really think it's a new approach to computer music.

On your first album you can also hear a fair amount of glitch. You managed to give it an emotional quality, a soul, whereas other artists in that field aimed for cerebral, terrorist, deconstructed music. How did you manage that?

The glitch scene grew out of experimenting with technology. When we started working with computers, I think we were doing roughly the same kind of things a lot of other people were doing at the time. Our goal, though, has always been to communicate feelings: for us experimentation was a tool, not so much an end in itself. That's maybe the difference.

I also think that early glitch wasn't so much made by people listening to each other and trying to replicate what others were doing, but by people experimenting with the same things independently, maybe without even knowing about the rest of the scene. When our first album came out and we started travelling around Europe, we were so surprised that similar things were happening elsewhere too, in Germany for instance!

A very particular effect your music has on me is that it projects me into a world where everything is illuminated. Things around me take on a different light, they seem more alive and interconnected. Is that just something in my head, or is it something you're actually going for?

I don't think it's a different world; it's more a different way of seeing the usual world. I think the reason many people associate this feeling with our music is that experiences like this happen commonly in life: if we happen to doze off during the day, when we wake up we see everything in a slightly different way. Or, by focusing on small, simple things, you can end up hypnotized by them, like right now as I drop sugar into my cup and watch the individual grains sink (drops sugar into the cup and watches the individual grains sink).

These things are, to me, not just interesting, but exactly the way I want to live my life!

Even your song titles often seem to refer to phenomena like this. Take “Asleep On A Train”/”Awake On A Train”…

Yes, they're all small experiences that everyone has, but doesn't pay attention to. Or rather, it's not that we don't pay attention to them, it's that we don't give them value: we always tend to think that the important things are something else.

When Gyða and Kristín Anna left the band, what changed? What did they bring in terms of ideas and attitude?

I don't think things changed much in terms of approach. The band is made up of people who come and go: the fact that Gyða is no longer part of the group (though she did play cello on “Go Go Smear…“) isn't a drastic change, but a natural process, felt as such by every member of the band.

With Gyða and Kristín there's that particular sense of “connection” that I feel with people who approach life in a way similar to mine, I think that's why they fit so well into the band.

The new album seems to me more straightforward than the previous ones, more song-oriented. Was this change deliberate, or just something that happened without you noticing?

We never really make many conscious decisions: when we're together, we do rather than discuss. Anyway, after "Go Go Smear..." we thought something like: "Let's see if we can make this album a bit simpler," since on the previous record we had something like 160 channels for every song and a constant back-and-forth between complex orchestral parts and utterly crazy electronics. So without overthinking it we set out to write songs that were more... songs, more songs, basically.

Do you find it harder, or easier, to write an actual song than to compose a more experimental piece?

Well, that's not really the right way to look at it: we didn't change our approach, the tracks came about the same way as before. The first song on the new record, for instance, comes across as a perfectly normal pop song, but it was born like this: Gunnar was in America, on a kind of farm, sitting at the piano, and he had the idea of stuffing it with paper and various objects he found lying around, then improvising on it. I then took what he'd recorded, cut it up, stitched it back together into a structure, and sang over it. It's a pop song! But we didn't approach it as such, we didn't sit down to write it — we made it exactly the way we've always done: trying things out a bit and seeing what comes of it.

Why did you move to Finland and Estonia to record parts of the album?

We're always on the lookout for beautiful places to go and relax and make music. Making music to a schedule, in a studio, is very hard for us; we prefer to go somewhere with no pressure, where we can just sit and eat and play, and if nothing good comes out of it, fine, that's okay too. We'd heard about this festival in Estonia on the shores of a lake, so we asked if we could play there and stay for a while. We were staying in a stunning fourteenth-century house, it was wonderful: I never quite figured out why, but the place was always full of busy people, people working, cooking, bringing us food, beer, wine. We stayed in two old rooms with a fireplace and made songs, it was something magical, the kind of place we'd dreamed of for years!

As for Finland, things are a bit different. Our drummer is Finnish, and he has a private studio on an island: so that was the best place to record the drum parts. We did it all in one trip: Estonia and Finland. For the previous album we'd been on another Finnish island, where we'd rented an old kindergarten for two weeks.

In your recent albums I sense a new direction, more choral. Backing vocals, folk melodies and instrumental symphonism create the feeling that the music expresses a "we" rather than a sum of individuals.

That's a great description of what we try to create with our music. This communal potential in our music is a direct consequence of the band's open-ended approach, and it's something we became aware of around "Summer Make Good" and started exploiting more explicitly on the two following albums.

The album's title refers to exactly this: we'd have a far better world if we agreed to open up, to sing together songs we don't yet know. Even when someone is afraid or doesn't know what they're supposed to do, everyone should sing along with the others, be an active part of something shared, of the world.

It's something that's starting to happen in Iceland, little by little. The situation over the last ten years has been pretty bad, people thought only about making money. Last year, though, things changed, people started to realize they'd been neglecting the most important things all that time.

So the so-called "crisis" brought something good, a chance for renewal?

Absolutely! Lots of people in Iceland see it that way, it's an extremely positive thing! The international press only looks at the economic side of the situation, but quality of life isn't just about what you have and what you can get. Many artists had been saying for a long time that there's much more to life than what was at the center of Icelanders' concerns: the banks, the power of the banks... When the banks collapsed, suddenly, a great many people felt lost, but they got back on their feet and realized the important things were elsewhere: the crisis brought a lot of unemployment and made imports difficult, but Icelanders rediscovered the need to fight, they turned off the TV, went out of their homes to stand in front of parliament. In a small country like Iceland, everyone can really play an active role in society, can take charge of their own life and make a difference.

Some books were already talking about this need two or three years ago. Back then there was a significant environmental movement: a big American company was trying to buy up a lot of land to build power plants, but it had no impact on society until now. Now people have realized it wasn't just talk...

How does an island of only 300,000 people end up with such a thriving music scene? It's almost unbelievable!

The reason definitely has to do with the very small size of the place and with a history rich in songs and traditions. In 1945 the American navy landed in Iceland and brought the rock revolution with it, quite early compared to other countries. Then the scene evolved on its own, mainly in Reykjavik, and with a very positive outlook: making music for your friends. So there are lots of styles and everyone tries to play with everyone else: to keep things varied, to keep it from getting boring. It's absolutely necessary, in such a small country!

We keep the conversation going for a few more minutes. Örvar tells me a bit about Iceland's other towns, urges me to visit the island's interior if I ever come back, and stresses the barbarity of whaling, a non-practice introduced on a large scale only a few decades ago, which he says brings no real income to his country: the international market is very limited, practically restricted to Japan alone, and most of the catch goes unsold and is simply thrown away. The government apparently keeps it going with a logic along the lines of "we're Icelandic, we have to hunt whales"; perhaps one of the positive effects of the crisis on the Icelandic population will be a growing awareness of just how absurd this is!

(30/08/2009)

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