Liquid lullabies

>> Soaking up Iceland’s latest, Múm

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Bearing many of the traits we associate with Icelandic music-lush textures, emotive melodies, technoid intricacies and pixilated vocals-Múm has your best interests at heart. These two tech geeks, Örvar Smárason and Gunnar Örn Tynes, and two classically trained twin sisters, Kristín Anna and Gyda Valtysdóttir, are now based between Reykjavik and Berlin. They reunite to make music in isolation (their sophomore disc, Finally, We Are No One, was recorded in a lighthouse), tour the world and engage in other fun group activities like cycling, swimming and pot-smoking. The Mirror asked Smárason about becoming Abba, having fun with silent film and mixing music with water.

Mirror: You’ve performed a few underwater concerts in Iceland. Are there recordings? Could you make an underwater record?
Örvar Smárason: We’d like to do more underwater concerts but you could never get the same effect in a recording. Hearing sound through water is so different from hearing through air. I don’t think you could capture that feeling listening back to it on regular speakers.

M: I guess an underwater tour isn’t very realistic either.
ÖS: Yeah, they have all these different rules everywhere about what you can and cannot do in a swimming pool. But there are some places. We might play one of those in a town outside Berlin. They have a pool that already has underwater speakers, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a training pool, or maybe they just play music when people are swimming.

M: How did this underwater thing get started?
ÖS: There were these friends of ours, these girls who had this idea and they got the city of Reykjavik to buy an underwater speaker from the U.S. army because they were selling it. I don’t know why they used it either.

M: How did you get involved in making scores for silent films?
ÖS: There used to be events in Reykjavik where electronic people would come and improvise, having seen the movie once, over old movies, and we did that [Nosferatu, Pandora’s Box, Un Chien Andalou]. Now we’ve done Battleship Potemkin, that’s for another project where the Icelandic Film Museum got people to write new scores for old films. It was really fun, and very interesting for us as musicians to play along with something visual, especially like this, when the movie really sets the tone for what we had to do.

M: The band started out as just you and Gunnar. Were you unsatisfied with that set-up?
ÖS: Yes, we didn’t feel like the band was complete, and then we were asked to make music for a college play and the girls were in the theatre group. They didn’t really want to act in the play so when we asked if some of the kids would rather play the music we wrote, they said yes.

M: So you and Kristín are a couple, but Gunnar and Gyda aren’t, right?
ÖS: It’s not like Abba, no.

M: Would it create a problem in the band if they were?
ÖS: Yeah probably, but it would be very funny as well. :

With Mitchell Akiyama at Petit Campus on Sunday, July 21, 9pm, $15

>> Music Listings