finetune artist: Mum

Sixty percent of Icelanders are reported to believe in the existence of fairies and Orvar Th¢reyjarson Sm rason, Gyda Valtysd¢ttir, Krist¡n Anna Valtysd¢ttir, and Gunnar Tynes create music that is magical enough to suggest they may have a point. Although twin sisters Krist¡n and Gyda (who were, famously, cover stars of Belle And Sebastian's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant) are reported to have previously featured in a group playing "dodgy' cover versions of Pixies songs and Gunnar Tynes" first compositions were for computer games, M£m (pronounced moom "like the Moomins') create the prettiest and most lovely of music. The Icelandic quartet wrote 2002"s Finally We Are No One in a deserted lighthouse, distilling intricate Powerbook programming and analogue instruments (melodica, glockenspiel, guitars, cello) into songs that were strange, beautiful and saturated with an unspecific melancholy. The band seem overtly inspired by their direct environment: on tracks like "In Through The Lamp" (from the Green Grass Of Tunnel EP) or "The Land Between Solar Systems" (from Finally We Are No One), the quartet coerce boreal drones and ticks from their instruments to create music that sounds as if epithetic to the slow, landscape-reshaping scrape of glaciers. Such recordings transcend M£m's self-description of their music as "something to do the ironing to". (The band has, likably, also expressed satisfaction that old people in Iceland seem to love their music.) On Lcksins Erum Vic Engin the quartet re-recorded their vocals for Finally We Are No One in their own language, inadvertently (for non-Icelandic speakers) accentuating the alien, the extrinsic and the otherworldly in their baroque neo-ambient recordings.

Listen to Mum at Finetune.

Green Grass of Tunnel

Anissa_Rose on 2008-03-05 17:55:37.110:
Yay! Now we just need more than one song.....
djdream on 2007-08-08 13:10:24.513:
WOW! Where did this come from!? We FINALLY have Mum in our database. Now I might just have to bring in the entire album for encoding. Enjoy!