SEASONED STUDIO
May 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Christine Hsieh
When the walls of Múm's recording space started to rattle, the band members knew they were on to something good. “We were recording, and then we thought we should put this bass drum through the amplifier,” Örvar Thóreyjarson Smàrason recalls with a mischievous look on his face. “Then, all of a sudden, the whole kit was run through this amplifier, and while we were recording, the house sounded crazy. The whole house was shaking!”
Granted, this is no common house that he's talking about — rather, it is the lighthouse-keeper's home that the band settled into on the southeastern fringes of Iceland. Smàrason, along with Gunnar Örn Tynes and vocalist Kristín Valtysdóttir, sought out two such locations to write and record their latest album, Summer Make Good (Fat Cat, 2004), and the results are stunning. This is an album of sweeping atmospherics, cinematic scope and surprising intimacy; it conjures forgotten folk songs and feeds them through lo-fi electronic equipment, creating an intriguing juxtaposition of old and new, fragile and enduring, spontaneous and calculated. “It's beautiful there, and we don't have to pay a lot of money to go to a fancy studio,” Smàrason says. “We're not making fancy music, so we could do it like this.”
And that's exactly the point: Múm is taking a step back from the carefully crafted electronics of its 2002 release, Finally We Are No One (Fat Cat), to experiment with sound, texture and depth via analog tape. “You get a wider spectrum of sound by doing it like this,” Tynes explains. “A lot of the sounds we're doing and the structures of the sounds, we create on the computer. But with using this together — the computer and the tape — and experimenting with recording techniques, you get a lot of hiss and a wide spectrum [of sound].”
The effect is less manufactured, more nuanced. There were challenges, however. “Because it was on tape, we wanted it to be exactly the way we wanted it at the end, instead of working with it on the computer like we did before,” Valtysdóttir says. Although that is easier said than done, recording digitally might have stripped away the timbre and feel of the group's assorted instruments, reducing their heft and sterilizing the sound. “In electronics and other instruments, they sound closer, the drums and the electronics,” Smàrason says. “With this, the instruments blend in a different way: Everything sounds a bit old.”
Indeed, it does seem wasteful to haul vintage amplifiers, keyboards and speakers to remote locations only to compress them into a neat, digital package. Using an array of pieces — including a Fender Rhodes electric piano, a glockenspiel, an accordion, a trumpet and even a custom-made guitar called a halldorophone — and running them through vintage amps and speakers in complex configurations, the group's songwriting and recording sessions became rather haphazard affairs. In fact, they have difficulty recalling the exact combinations at times. “There were some sounds that didn't make it on the album because we lost them,” Tynes says with a shrug. “We try to forget that!”
“It was very uncontrolled,” Smàrason admits. “Probably all the coolest things didn't make it to the album!”
Therein lies the key to Summer Make Good: a sense of life and action that's not always present in the flat, digitized space of relentlessly programmed, meticulously looped electronic music. “If you do something and it sounds great and you don't know what you did, in the end, that's what matters,” Tynes says emphatically.
“I'd start getting very bored if I started understanding everything about what I'm doing,” Smàrason concurs. “Then, it's time to move on to something else!”
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