Product Description

Second album by Icelandic electronic/indie quartet, their follow-up to 2000's 'Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK'. Awarm, emotive take on electronic music combining complex programming with strongly melodic vocals and rich, expressive playing on a variety of acoustic instruments. Includes the single 'Green Grass Of Tunnel'.

Track Listing

1. Sleep/swim
2. Green Grass of Tunnel
3. We Have a Map of the Piano
4. Don’t Be Afraid, You Have Just Got Your Eyes Closed
5. Behind Two Hills..... a Swimmingpool
6. K/half Noise
7. Now There’s That Fear Again
8. Faraway Swimmingpool
9. I Can’t Feel My Hand Any More, It’s Allright, Sleep Still
10. Finally We Are No One
11. The Land Between Solar Systems

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32292 in Music
• Released on: 2002-05-20
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

It's a temperature thing!
Just a quicky on this as I only picked it up on spec at the library. Icy, doodly, tinkly, slowly developing, atmospheric music, with hushed and breathy female vocals on occasion. This sort of music is almost a genre in itself (see Sigur Ros as another example) Is it only because they come from Iceland that the one word description of this album that springs to mind is "glacial"?

One negative thing though - the faux static that appears in many of these tracks is extremely annoying after a while.

Good Background Music
I think that this CD is good for relaxing or wineing and dining to. Just simply have it in the back-ground playing as it's that kind of music, i think it's a good album.
MUM is an Icelandic band.

Magic and fragility
A lot of very interesting music comes out of Iceland aside from Björk, and Múm are a fine example, Icelanders now based in Reykjavik and Berlin. The album was apparently conceived in a lighthouse in north-west Iceland and recorded in Reykjavik at the studios of Sigur Ros. The overall sound suggests what Vespertine might have sounded like without Björk; perhaps partly because they shared the same studio engineer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, but also because the sense of magic and fragility, and a child-like sense of discovery is overwhelmingly present on both. 
From the album, Green Grass Of Tunnel was released as a single and was no. 48 in the 2002 John Peel Festive 50. Several other titles look like old Yoko Ono B-sides, for example Don't Be Afraid, You Have Just Got Your Eyes Closed, and I Can't Feel My Hand Any More, It's Alright, Sleep Still. The album culminates in a glorious 12-minute epic, The Land Between Solar Systems.
Múm were at this time classically-trained Gyöa Valtýsdóttir (vocal, xylophone, melodica) and sister Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (vocal, cello, xylophone, melodica, keyboards), Gunnar Örn Tynes (keyboards, guitar), Örvar Fóreyjarson Smárason (keyboards, melodica, glockenspiel, guitar) and Samuli Koskinen (drums, percussion). Gyöa and Kristín can be seen on the cover of Belle and Sebastian's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant album