MÚM

Could you introduce the members of Múm?

There are four of us: Kristin, Gyda, Orvar and Gunni. Kristin and Gyda are girl names, but Orvar and Gunni are boys.

Where are you located?

We have been in Copenhagen-Denmark for the summer, relaxing and making musik. But now the girls have gone back to Reykjavik, because they have school. The boys are staying in Copenhagen for little while longer, but next week they will have to find a new flat there or move somewhere else. Maybe Berlin.

How long have you been playing music together and how did Múm start?

We released our first musik in summer of 1998. It was a split ten inch with a band called Sp™nk on clear vinyl with some very nice songs on there. But back then it was only the boys. The girls joined the band in the fall when we all worked together on some theater music.

Do you ever play out live?

Yes we do, it is a big part of Múm and we enjoy it very much. We have not played a lot outside of Iceland though, just the odd concerts we were really excited about doing. This summer we played the Paradiso in Amsterdam and did a radio session for the VPRO there. Then we played three gigs in Helsinki with the Icelandic Kitchen Motors. It was a kind of an Icelandic mini-festival.

Iím not very familiar with many Icelandic bands (or Denmark). Is Kitchen Motors the name of the music festival?

It is a kind of a program or a group from Reykjavik that has been very active in the last two years. The idea was to create this thing where musicians from different areas can work together, the electronic kids, the jazz folks, the rockers , the noise people and the organists. It started with a concert series with four concerts in Reykjavik. We did an improvisation with an organ playing guy and a drummer on one of the gigs. Then there were two bigger shows on the Reykjavik Jazz festival in a nice theater and it included a fifteen-player guitar orchestra. This year there have been monthly shows on different locations in Reykjavik with a bit of a broader goal, blending together different artists, not necessarily musicians. We wrote an operetta with an Icelandic surrealist writer, Sjon, that was performed by an opera singer and a string quartet.

Whatís the music scene like in Iceland? Are there many electronic artists that you know?

There is a lot going on. Thule, the label that put out our album, has a lot of talented artists, like Biogen and Ruxpin, who have both done remixes for us. They are both amazing. And then there is Borko, who is maybe closest to our sound. He is a kind of a genius.

And then thereís all the Kitchen Motors artists and the bands that have been formed through that, like the organ quartet Apparat and the big band Brutal. There is not a lot happening in Denmark, apart from the Hobby Industries label. Opiate is brilliant and the two Orchard 12 inches I have heard are amazing, but living in Denmark I did not notice anything interesting going on.

What was the theater music you worked on for when you met the other half of the band?

It was college play called N·tt™ruÛperan. We are working on another play by the same writer. Itís a childrenís play in the national theater in Iceland.

Do you all have trained music backgrounds or is music something that youíve taught yourselves?

Gyda studies cello and Kristin studies the piano. But me and Gunni have not learned anything.

I never saw the split 10 inch before, only the ìYesterday was Dramaticî CD and the ìBroken Birdieî 12 inch. Are there any other releases?

There was a CD with the music from the play, which isnít really good and then we did musik for a poetry disk. And we put out a split CD-single with Musikvatur, the organ guy we played with in the Kitchen Motors. There was one song from our 10 inch and a song from his 7 inch and then we both did remixes of each otherís songs.

Are you working on a new release now?

Yeah, we are working on 12 inch for Morr Music here in Berlin, which is our favorite label at the moment. Thereís so much amazing music coming out there. And we are working on our second album, but it is hard to talk about that.

Do you record at home? ...I get the feeling you record straight to a Macintosh maybe?

We do things ourselves. We donít like talking too much about how we make our music. It is not very interesting. It might be an interesting story if I told you that we make all our music on big machines we built ourselves in a wooden shed.

Your compositions are complex and dramatic and they tend to invoke stories in my mind. Do you have any sort of narrative in mind when you make your songs?

We construct a setting around the music that is a bit more open for the listener than a narrative. We have a developed idea of a little world around the music and a feeling and then we try to give clues and little pictures of it. But there is maybe a story that is going around in our heads, which is maybe best kept there.

How do you like Berlin so far? Do you have another right job now besides making music?

Berlin is great and everyone is being very helpful and nice to us. There are a lot of like-minded artists here and we are very happy to be able to interact with them. There are a lot of geniuses here.

How did you choose the name Múm?

It sounds nice in Icelandic but terrible in English. We did not think of that before we chose it and we are having a hard time in getting people to spell it as we like it: M™m. In our language it sounds more like moom. I like to think of it maybe more of a mixture of a sound and little picture, than a name.

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