Blending live instrumentation and electronic / programmed elements, múm produced a wealth of sonic texture, with instrumentation including melodica, glockenspiel, accordian, keyboards, trumpet, viola, stroh-violin, bowed musical saw, pump organ, Chinese harp, and banjo.
With most of the tracks originally written in a remote lighthouse in Galtarviti in the northwest of Iceland, "summer make good" was then recorded over a period of seven weeks in an empty weather station / light-keeper's house beneath the circling beams of another lighthouse in Gardskagatá, at the southwest edge of the same country. Both were spartan, magical locations - isolated and surrounded by open seas and rugged landscape. At Galtarviti, communicating with the outside world entailed a three-hour climb up a mountain to where they could get a mobile reception, whilst the band had to cross rough seas in a tiny boat to get provisions.
One night, the boat's faltering engine totally died on Gunni around midnight in the open sea and he was luckily rescued by a returning fishing boat. When FatCat's Dave Cawley went to visit the band there, they ended up stranded for three days and forced into a nightmarish adventure during fierce winds and a storm that involved climbing across mountains, being rescued by local Icelandic fisherman, and eventually being delivered back to the lighthouse by two different (drunken) fisherman who were swigging a large bottle of whiskey whilst firing shotguns at seals and seagulls as their boat lurched and rolled in a 15ft swell. Whilst events at Gardskagatá were far less dramatic, they were no less informative to the album, and the location itself is audible throughout. Scattered across the album between the more complete songs, lie a number of dysfunctional / eerily atmospheric interludes: you can hear the wind, creaking wood, dripping water and the crackle and click of old vinyl…
Within the building's spartan and peeling interior, the band founded an experimental and intensely creative atmosphere. With a huge pile of instruments and equipment dragged from Reykjavik on the back of a pickup truck, recording locations were set up in rooms throughout the house. Instead of recording into and manipulating everything on computer, they sought a more physical / hands-on process. There are still electronic elements there in the mix, yet rather than running recorded sounds through DSP / plug-ins, they pushed them instead through a variety of vintage amplifiers and old gramophone speakers. Tracks became synchronised between Pro Tools and one inch analogue tape. The resultant grain and depth of recording is immediately audible - less thin, increasingly less reliant on digital technology, this album sounds rich, warm and incredibly deep; suffused with layers of crackle and hiss. Listen in and the level of accumulated details becomes astonishing - a wealth of sparkling, heavily layered intricacies that swirl, fizz and bounce around without ever descending into an overloaded mulch. Combined with the continually-shifting / sprawling dynamics of the songs, these fleeting details draw you in and make you want to listen back again, offering a real adventure for the listener.
múm members started to play music way before the band took form. Here are the facts.
Gunni started is career by doing old-school hardcore music (some connoisseurs say that these tunes are pure dance floor anthems) on an Amiga. Maybe these tracks will be released one day, but just maybe.
Kristín and Gyða started to play piano and cello at a tender age, and when both were 9 years old, they decided to do a musical about garbage children with their classmates at music school. The boys spotted the girls playing at a community centre, as part of a dodgy band doing Pixies cover versions, both girls were then 15 years old.
Örvar began to do music when his parents bought their first computer. He needed a tune for a game he was programming on BASIC. Since then his love for bleeps as never diminished.
...now they are múm.
