"Images start to come, and you're introduced to feelings you maybe don't know so well," says Valtysdóttir, an elfin character who speaks in a soft voice that tends to trail off.
"Often it's better to remember bits of things than to see them all clearly," adds multi-instrumentalist Tynes, who thankfully uses more concrete metaphors to describe their sound.
Take Summer Make Good's opening couplet, "Hú Hviss -- A Ship" and "Weeping Rock, Rock." The former opens with wind-generated gusts and melodies dissipating in the distance. A minute and a half in, the wind fades away to daintily flitting beats, droning pump organ and accordion, and trembling viola, the instruments fading back and forth in a flickering dance as Valtysdóttir, in a childlike, birdlike chirp, softly croons of the bleakest of nights. One is led to wonder if this song was an actual campfire composition or merely the interpolation of many gypsy nights read about in books. Instrumentally, all of the parts assuredly interact, but could easily be separated into self-contained environs.
"For our purposes when recording, we [use] small pieces collected together and long sections cut into pieces," says Tynes. "We don't write entire songs before going in the studio. Our albums are finished when we have successfully pieced together the many parts. We don't worry about where they will go until the end."
This constructive process established Múm as a forerunner of organica alongside Four Tet, Manitoba, Dntel, the Notwist, and Boards of Canada, among others. The music of Múm always functions best in environments removed from traditional urban surroundings and shielded from contemporary distractions. For home listening purposes, a pair of headphones is an invaluable instrument in hearing the way their darkly spirited sounds bow and beckon. When on tour, their performances translate best in old theaters, rough-hewn auditoriums, and houses with time-worn acoustics, rather than your standard bar or nightclub.
Perhaps this is why Summer Make Good was recorded to sixteen-track tape through old amps and gramophones, and arranged on ProTools in a lighthouse keeper's house atop an isolated jetty that was only accessible by a rubber raft guided gingerly through jagged rock outcroppings. The title itself comes across almost like a challenge, since Múm spent much of the time weaving shards of sound together in a studio powered by a wind-up solar generator (it was later mixed down in fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós's studio) during 24-hour daylight. With the winds and ghosts that whipped across the sea's depths as the only neighbors, the band, aided by contemporary Orri Jonson of countrymen/touring mates Slowblow, created a work that creaks and groans.
But Múm stands apart from its Icelandic pop contemporaries. Unlike Sigur Rós, it wades into the sorrows with eyes cast low instead of head held high, digging in the dirt instead of attaining transcendence. In contrast to the slowcore shuffle of Slowblow or the glossy, creeping cascades of Worm Is Green, Múm is the thrift-store cousin: rumpled, reserved, and prone to scrawling surreptitiously in a closely guarded journal.
Múm's sound has gone from lulling fairytale flirt on 2000's Yesterday Was Dramatic -- Today Is OK and 2002's Finally We Are No One, to an Old World weariness. The mood is brood rather than bliss. The ambiance is more sturdy tangle than delicate latticework. The band's previous albums imparted the feeling of sharing lonely beauty with you, while Summer Make Good is the tale of someone's immersion in total separation.
Concocted from sounds isolated, then gently minced, grated, and puréed, the Summer Make Good sessions were a soup left to simmer and season on the burner until the last minute. On "The Island of Children's Children," accordion yawns across chiming glockenspiel, Chinese harp, and digital twitters. Every minute or so, the sound ebbs away. The strokes become broad, and the song, unfurled, opens itself to vocals layered into a call-and-response.
"The analog way of capturing sound is more dynamic, has more feeling," says Tynes. "But digital can have more control. For this album, arranging it after coming off tour, we wanted to make something where the sounds were more distinctly interactive.
"But we also wanted to make some of the parts of it sounds that could not truly exist," he adds. "Digital lets us bend how sounds behave, but we use digital not to create, just to sequence and structure. Blending was the goal."
Space (its presence and the need for it) and creative use of silence seem to remain the central themes throughout Múm's process. Several tracks, including "Stir" and "Abandoned Ship Bells," leave more space between beats than the beats themselves take up, only increasing the music's melancholy, meditative nature. Prior to Summer Make Good, space also proved integral to the band's mental health, to the members' ability to look past the immediate to a more synergistic composite.
"Once you separate yourself, you realize a lot of things you don't realize in the city, when you live in the consumer-friendly environment we all have around us," says Tynes. "It's not escapism; it's more you realize you don't need so much öconveniences' that become distractions, ways to make life easy [and] less fulfilling because there's less challenge to satisfy yourself with higher standards -- like the Starbucks on the corner [or] the home delivery pizza. You can be perfectly happy with few things as long as they are ones you appreciate."
"We had no distractions recording," concludes Valtysdóttir. "We didn't have night really, so time would go according to the tides. I like watching the tides, because they work a lot like how we percolate ideas. We surrounded ourselves with instruments and places that spoke to us, and we listened. You can hear them, as much as you can hear us, when you close your eyes."
