múm | TapeOp

The Icelandic group Múm started off as a four piece mixing inventive but orthodox electronica with acoustic instruments. Now they're a three-piece, and their music - neither wholly electronic nor acoustic - has become startlingly unique. For live shows they augment PowerBook grooves with guitars, banjo, accordion, melodicas, bells, xylophone, trumpet, strings, and musical saw. Their recently-released third album, Summer Make Good, adds harp, Stroh violin, and North Atlantic gales to this mix, and it should be required listening for anyone looking to create and capture hitherto unheard sounds in any genre of music. I spoke to Örvar Smárason from the group about the making of the album, which was conceived in Berlin, recorded in an old lighthouse keeper's house by Orri Jonson of Slowblow and mixed in Sundlaugin, Sigur Rós' swimming pool studio.

One notable thing about this and your previous records is that they've been done in unusual or out of the way locations as opposed to studios. How much does that contribute to your sound?

It's hard to say, as we thought we could have made the same record even if we'd stayed in Berlin, since we wrote a lot of these songs there. But the location had a lot of influence on us. We never really saw the point of studio recording, at least not for this album. You pay a lot of money to be in as tudio, and we thought, What are we really getting?

You recorded in a house in Gardskagaviti, on the west coast of Iceland. What kind of gear did you bring over for that?

A lot of old guitar amps. We had a very small brown one called an Orpheus, we had a Watkins - I can't remember the model, but it was triangular, and very beautiful – and a Fender Twin that we used for a lot of things. They're responsible for a lot of how the album sounds. We recorded so much through these guitar amps, and we also recorded quite a few things through these horns, like you find on a gramophone. And then we brought a lot of instruments and microphones.

How did you go about integrating the tracks you prepared in Pro Tools, in Berlin, with what was being played live at Gardskagaviti, to make them sit better together?

That mostly happened by taking things through speakers and amps. There was this one tiny plastic speaker in the kitchen we used. And just playing sounds through the room as well – playing the speakers at one end, and mic'ing them at the other end...

So you get this big room sound.

Yeah. Just experimenting like that, seeing where it's good to do it - there were a lot of these things. And by spending a lot of time on each song, that's how we made them sit. The first week of recording was just drums, because our drummer, Samuli Kosminen, could only come out then. But after that it was very different. Sometimes we'd be working on just one song for a day, and another day we might work on five or six songs, depending on what worked best. We're just having fun mostly - we don't want to be always doing the same things. It's so much fun to be doing different things every day.

Recording is weird like that. You're often working to a deadline, but you have to keep it exciting for yourself so you can come up with new ideas.

I like it though - there's something about the deadline that's kind of okay. It makes you actually finish the thing, because if we didn't have it we would just take forever. Orri really had a hard time working with the deadline. His motto is that good things always happen really slowly. I think we do things kind of slowly, but maybe too fast for him. [laughs] He really brought a lot to the album though, all this warm sound. That's why we wanted him to come.

Where did that warm sound come from? Did you record everything to tape?

No. All our first recordings were to Pro Tools, and then we synced these with a Tascam 16-track that Orri brought, and they just worked together. Some things from Pro Tools got recorded again through something else to tape, and sometimes when we needed space for more things on tape we'd take tracks and bounce them back to Pro Tools. We moved stuff backwards and forwards between formats. But in each song there's always digital and 16-track sounds, because we have a lot of tracks in every song, even though maybe it sounds small and minimal. We mixed it all down to 1/4" tape, using a machine that we borrowed from a guy in Iceland.

I heard you had problems with the tape machine, and that at one stage it got so cold it started playing slow.

Yeah, it got so cold in the room, and there were a few problems with the sync. It all worked out in the end though. There were just a few headaches along the way.

What type of mics did you use – anything special?

We borrowed a lot of mics and tried different things out. I can't remember the models, but we used RODE, Neumann and Brauner ones. That was so chaotic, because we just put something up and everything happened really quickly. You know, microphone placement, I look at it much more as some kind of art rather than a technique. Maybe that's wrong, but people seem to have a feel for it rather than knowing exactly what to do. One of the most interesting things for me was the recording of the drums, because we set up the drum kit in a room in the house and we mic'ed it up. We had a lot of shitty mics, just these really cheap crap mics, and we put one on the bass drum and put it though this Orpheus amp and it sounded so good! Then we mic'ed the amp itself with a better mic. And then we just had to do this on the floor tom as well, and in the end we had crap mics on all the drums and we had amplifiers in different rooms all over the house, and the kit sounded so huge, and the house shook when we played.

I presume the house was quite big and open then, as you got a really good room sound on the drums.

Yeah, I really liked it, and I think the house really comes through on the album.

So how many of the rhythm tracks were programmed by you, and how many of them were played live by Samuli?

He drums on all of the songs on the new album. And the good thing, the crazy thing is that when you listen to it you can't tell which is which. We make a lot of the drum sounds out of things around us that we bang and then sample and sequence. And Samuli plays everything, not just drums, and that's why the two things are matched together so well. And he's really innovative with sounds. We even recorded the percussion of one song in the bathtub – we filled the bathtub up with water, took the cymbals and hit them, and mic'ed the bathtub up, and then took the samples from the tub.

Wow – kind of like a resonator. You used some unusual instruments as well, like the Stroh violin that Ólöf plays. Were they all recorded individually, or at any stage were three or four of you playing live?

No, it was never like that when we actually recorded it. We'd been playing it live on tour before, but in the end we recorded it with all the instruments on their own.

You use a lot of natural sounds too, like the wind. Is that the creaking of a boat on one of the tracks?

Well, the thing that sounds like the creaking of a boat is actually an acoustic guitar rubbing against my pants or something! It sounds like a boat though. The wind and the sea, it was kind of impossible not to have them, because they were always there. The place we recorded in the end was the windiest place in Iceland, and it's always [makes huge whooshing noise], so in the end we just had to record it.

But when you were recording quiet instruments, like the harp, did the wind cause problems with background noise?

No, that would never be a problem – we would always keep it!

With all the live instruments, and with the way you play around with the electronic sounds you're using, this album sounds quite different than your previous ones. Was this a conscious decision, or did it just come out of the way you recorded it?

No, we never really thought about what we were going to do. I remember we wanted to do something that would sound really old. We also wanted to do something that would sound like a record you would find in a flea market, or one that you didn't know where it came from. Other than that we didn't talk too much about it. We knew we wanted to use different techniques of recording it than before though.

Kristín's vocals also sound quite different. There's still that blurred, multi-tracked effect, but they're much clearer and more focused. How did that come about?

The thing is that there was no reverb, no delays, no effects at all on her voice, though we did use them on the other albums. But the biggest difference is how Kristín sings differently; she seems all of a sudden to have found her own way of singing, and all of her vocals on the album just went straight to tape. She would sing many times and then work out a system of how to mix the tracks up - she practices with the faders and mixes them herself. She would sing maybe four tracks in a song, and then she would mix between them, fade between them, use parts of each and write down which parts to use.

Like comping them together...

Yes, but it was all with the faders on the desk. It was so great because, I know it's not a long time ago since we started using Pro Tools, and since everyone started using Pro Tools, but mixing on a big desk was so free! It was such a great thing - the four of us were sitting in front of the desk, and everyone had their job riding the faders to create the mix.

You mixed it on the Neve broadcast console that Sigur Rós have in their studio, didn't you? Is there any automation on that?

No, I don't think so. At least, we didn't use it if there is.

Did the Neve change the sound of the mixes?

Yeah, I think so - it definitely did. I kind of expected it to do more though. It's difficult to say, because as soon as you change the room where you record to the one where you mix, it sounds different and you can't really say what the desk did with it.

So what were you using to monitor through there?

We have these Genelecs, I can't remember what they're called, and then we have the NS-10s, because I think it's good to listen through them too. And then Orri always wants to hear everything through his living room speakers, so we had them as well. So we had three sets of speakers.

Sigur Rós's studio seems like a lovely place.

Yes. It's in such a nice area as well – it's really beautiful around there.

The music scene in general in Iceland seems very supportive.

It's supportive between people, because all the musicians are friends and they all support each other - that's the important part. There's nothing from the government or anything that helps the bands. Although we borrowed the house where we recorded from the town we were in. They let us take it for free.

That's a benefit of digital technology, isn't it? There aren't many lighthouse keepers needing houses any more.

No, there aren't! [laughs]