Wordless Music Series: Múm, NYC, 09 & 10/11/07

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Múm are from Iceland. They are exceptionally polite, exceptionally attractive, and exceptionally gifted. Over their two day stint for Wordless Music, they attracted some of the largest crowds ever to the series. They have a dedicated following, completely in love with and absolutely willing to succumb to the band’s hypnotic pep. Where fellow Icelanders Sigur Ros are ominous and glacial, Múm are shiny and bright, the sun that glints off of white ice rather than the dark blue shadows.

As Wordless organizer, Ronen Givony, stated in his introduction of the band, Múm are a perfect band for the series. As an attempt to mix up and smash up generic boundaries from a curatorial level, Wordless thrives not just on the juxtaposition of different types of music but also on those bands that already embody the interzones of classification. Múm absolutely do so: electronic music, folk music, children’s music, “classical” music, ambient music, rock music: each of these categories can describe some part of their sound, but not the complete picture. The whole is certainly more than the sum of its parts. They have an unplaceable, sui generis quality, as though their influences are right on the tip of your tongue, but then you just can’t figure them out.

The first night, Múm performed at The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, a cavernous space built in 1858. The reverberations lasted at least 7 seconds; one could hear sound pinging back and forth, trapped above, somewhere in the high-arched ceilings. Múm played a set of songs that were mostly from their new album, but they tailored their playing to the particular quirks of that echo chamber space. They slowed the music down and decreased extraneous noise (guitarist Róbert Reynisson was particularly understated) in order to take advantage of the church’s acoustics without creating a wall of incomprehensible mush. The voices of the three lead singers absolutely floated, but one never quite felt like disappearing into the celestial vault. The band’s amazing set of instruments—melodicas (a favorite of Wordless performers), ukuleles (another favorite), pianos, voice-changers, bodiless drums (drummer Samuli Kosminen only uses drum heads for a particularly snappy sound), cellos, violins, and many more I probably missed—kept us thoroughly grounded in impossible-to-describe but decidedly earthy textures. Even with all these instruments, the most exciting part of the evening was their cover of a Washington Phillips gospel song. This nearly forgotten singer from the 1920’s and 30’s definitely emphasized the folk chorus singing-in-school part of their sound over the icy/sunny electronic part.

On this night, the opening act—Montreal band Torngat, a trio of performers centered around Pietro Amato, the French Horn player from Arcade Fire—provided a similar contrast of celestial pull and multi-instrumental groundwork. True showmen, the horn players—Amato and Julien Poissant—at one point left the stage in the hands of Mathieu Charbonneau on Wurlitzer in order to walk around the audience, spitting out little whale calls to each other as Charbonneau kept up a steady riff. After this tour around the space, they “found” each other and blasted improvisations directly into each other’s horn bells. It was fun, the perfect sonic freak out needed to loosen up the churchy atmosphere.

After their performance, Jihyun Kim played solo cello works by Bach and Ligeti. Her performance was ecstatic and at times there was some serious “shredding” (is one allowed to say that about a cello?). The acoustics of the space did not quite suit the intimacy needed for a solo instrumentalist. Luckily, I was sitting in the front so I could hear the dynamic contrasts and the eerie glissandos in Ligeti’s piece, but I fear that the delicacy of these quiet moments did not transfer to the audience at large. Still, the coolest aspect of these pieces (to me) is that they create contrapuntal effects with a single instrument, and the long reverb only intensified that process of self-counterpoint.

On the second night—this time at the Society for Ethical Culture, still a large space with a high domed ceiling, but less “live” and more intimate—Múm played a set that was noisier and less atmosphere-conscious. Before I get to their set, however, I must mention the opening act Hauschka, the alias of Volker Bertelmann of Dusseldorf, Germany. He played prepared piano and electronics, and his music startled me with its contrast between playfulness and depth. There are two kinds of innovators: those that break down boundaries and create new fields for artistic exploration and those that can reach the outermost reaches of a given aesthetic field to find new emotions within old techniques. John Cage is an example of the former, and Hauschka, who follows in Cage’s footsteps with the use of the prepared piano but outreaches him in emotional intensity, is an example of the latter. Truly innovative and powerful music. It was a great discovery for me, and I’m excited to hear more from him. Bing and Ruth, a band who make ambient textures from acoustic instruments, also opened. Their sound would, perhaps, have been better suited to the Church (in exchange with Jihyun Kim?), where their enfolding, engulfing sweeps of sound could have filled the space like a wet sponge.

And now to Múm: the drums were hit harder, the melodicas rang out even louder, the bass amp was kicked with more gusto, kazoos were introduced to the mix, more dancing on stage happened… the joy of playing was palpable. They became the cutest band in the world. They acted with near surprise and thankfulness at every audience handclap. They invited the opening bands to come sing on stage with them. They invited audience members with kazoos or harmonicas to play on stage with them. Everyone was taking the happy pills. And that’s great, because the band is fundamentally a happy-sounding band, perhaps the aural equivalent to Matisse’s Joy of Life paintings: lots of color, movement, and near-abstraction. The melodica interplay on the song “Blessed Brambles” seemed particularly innocent and free. And the Eastern European-inflected (visions of Beirut) trance of “A Little Bit, Sometimes” hit the danceable spot in everyone’s heart (though no spontaneous dancing occurred: pews have a powerful effect). The highlight of the evening for me, though, was “Moon Pulls” during the encore. This is one of the more low-key, down-turned songs in their set; it has a darkness and a minor quality that is not usually there. This time the band really did pull us into the celestial reaches, as they asked us to “feel/ the moon pull your lover’s blood up/ to the sky.”

Links
Wordless Music Series [official site]
Photos [chris owyoung]