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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Múm are all at sea. “It just kind of came out,” says Múm’s Örvar Thóreyjarson Smárason rather sheepishly. But despite his guilt-ridden admission, Smárason - one third of Iceland’s sonic experimentalists’ recently depleted core - has nothing to apologise for. Far from confessing some dreadful deed, he is merely trying to explain the genesis of his band’s haunting new album, Summer Make Good. Múm, it seems, are not a band in control. And that, he says, is just the way they like it.“We really had no idea how our album would sound,” continues Smárason in his soft Morten Harket-meets-Björk voice. Although Summer Make Good is the band’s third album proper, it’s also the first since the departure of joint-founder, cellist Gyda Valtysdóttir, and Múm had no creative intentions or expectations. Except, that is, to make something beautiful. Which is exactly what they’ve done. Written at a remote lighthouse only accessible by sea, Summer Make Good is a powerful album of soaring wonder and deep glacial sorrow. “There’s something about the calm of the place, being there with nothing around for hours and the adventure of getting there - something about having to go on a boat - that is really inspiring,” says Smárason.  Like their Icelandic cousins, Sigur Ros, Múm weave analogue and digital sounds into intricate blankets of warm human noise. Kristín Anna Valtysdóttir’s ghostly whispered vocals lend the music a tender innocence, while fragile, spluttering electronica and wistful minor chords - accordions, moogs, banjos and melodicas, warmed through gramophone speakers and vintage amps - meld with creaking ropes, dripping water and raging winds to pierce the music with an eerie forlornness. Summer Make Good is by turns gentle and soothing, mighty and raw, a wonderful, arresting album that mirrors the band’s splendid and dramatic surroundings. Múm utterly surrendered themselves to their environment and its impact bleeds through every song. Even hijacking Múm’s cinematic music to tell its own sorry tale. There’s a story running through their album says Smárason, but its existence is not deliberate: “I don’t think there is really any actual story there,” he admits. “But it exists in the music and that is special.” Smárason thinks for a moment. “I hope our music can touch people in a different way. In a way impossible with other things,” he says, struggling with his broken English. “I hope it plants an idea or feeling that wasn’t there before. Maybe make people think a little. If it does then I’m happy.” He laughs to himself. “But then, you have to realise you can’t actually control anything.”
Alexia Loundras
Múm - Summer Make Good, released 05 April 04 on FatCat Records.
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