A Number Of Small Things/Artists/Múm products

Apfelsin Bros. - Picture Book 24,99 €

Sindri from Sin Fang and Seabear and Örvar from Múm are good friends. They are tattoo buddies. They are football chums. They have travelled all over the world together in a tour bus. It's about time they made a book together. There is something similar about how these boys paint the world. There is a certain crudeness to their aesthetic unravellings, one could liken it to pancreas surgery performed with a spoon. And however colorful, lighthearted and festive their drawings, music or jokes are, there is always a certain self-reflexivity to what they spew. And to chart and map the reoccurring themes of the book, they have included a song. In two parts. It's a jolly romper.

This book contains 80 pages of drawings and it's covered in orange linen weave. Including a 5'' vinyl with digital download code of a collaborative song. Limited to 1000 copies.

Múm - Gle∂ileg Jól 4,99 €

While on travels through Iceland in 1772, the Bishop of Uppsala wrote in a letter: "..the Icelanders sing terrible and totally out of time." 239 years later, not much has changed except that nowadays the world seems to have acquired a taste for it. From this island, múm send you seasonal greetings! This 7inch contains two interpretations of conventional Icelandic christmas songs: Nú er Gunna á n˛ju skónum ('Now Gunna is wearing her new shoes') and Babbi segir ('Daddy Says'), both of which are traditionally sung around the tree at christmas-dances. They are arranged for guitar, autoharp, kazoos and voices and are sung in the aforementioned terrible beautiful style. The sensation is as it should be, slightly festive stuff yet melancholic, floating somewhere between pure naiveté and lucid Kitsch: It's really just like christmas. This 7inch comes with an artwork by the band's lead singer Örvar ˝óreyjarson Smárason and a coupon for a free download of this single plus a a digital bonus track.

Múm - Please Smile My Noise Bleed 9,99 €

In a way it was only a matter of time before múm would end up on Morr music. Anyone who has had the pleasure of listening to the Icelandic quartet’s celebrated debut album `Yesterday was dramatic, today is ok´ knows that múm’s `eye shutting-bicycle beats, sounds and melodies´ would feel suitably at home with the Morr.

This record came to be raw for múm, like raw carrot. In a way their maschines wrote the musik themselves, while múm were playing around on a mountain, lying down, standing up, running around. When they came back they were surprised by their beauty. This is where things started looping and feedbacking and even the old mountain radio swam in with a few random words and murmurs. A very old distant friend joined in singing, but only for a split second. When the songs had recorded themselves on tape, Thomas sent them out to all his nice guys who made new pieces out of them, each one special in its being musik:

Christian Kleine’s old mountain radio is playing a steady diet of old school electro pop. 8 bit snare drums and a deep massaging subbass manage to puta headnoddingly near-perfect groove into múm’s delicacies.

Styrofoam has the original múm melodies spinning out of control while somewhere along the way a vocoder and a steady kickdrum manage to sneak in.

Bernhard Fleischmann makes a happy return with some splendid cut-up old school hiphop action and the múm girls humming along gently.

Phonem turns múm’s clearcut melodies into shifting layers of grainy sound and deep textures, only to be interrupted by an ever evolving broken beat.

Arovane does what he does best. Lush homemade synths and basement beats. two step amx style so to speak.

I.S.A.N. contribute their dark and brooding cantena mix ? all deep analogue bass and persistently ringing bells with the original melody making only the vaguest of appearances.

» What is this múm?

múm is a musikal band of four. You could call them a quartet, but that would maybe be stretching the truth. Two years ago they crafted their debut album, `Yesterday was dramatic, today is ok´, in a small sweaty room. A few good folks were very happy with the record and urged them to do some more musik, which was totally unnessecary because they had already planned on doing so. And since then they have. They have worked with a lot of people, writers, singers, dancers, experimetalfolks, sadlaptopfolks, priests and activists to do all the things they could think of and some of it actually turned out pretty good. But now they are back to making some musik on their lonesome.

Múm - Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is Ok 9,99 €

Introduction by Örvar (múm)

This album was recorded very shortly after me and Gunni met Kristín and Gyda and we became a four people band. We had just been two in the band before and released a split "10 with the girl-band Spunk and played a few concerts. Yesterday was dramatic - today is ok was mostly recorded in a tiny, sweaty room in the summer of 1999 with carpenters banging nails around us, but sometimes we put on headphones so we couldn't hear them.

It was originally released on an Icelandic label called Thule, but early on a number of disputes came up, which ended up dragging on for many years. Fighting over music is both sad and kind of boring, but sometimes there is really nothing else you can do. For us it is something worth fighting for.

We have the rights for the record back now and are really happy to be re-releasing it on our friends label where it seems to fit in like home. And we have at last managed to make it sound pretty good, the way we always wanted, with the help of our friend Helmut Erler at dubplates and mastering. Let's hope things are finally OK.

This is the first proper Europe and USA wide release of this album, fully supported by distribution companies who are in direct contact with the record label.

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It doesn't happen very often, in fact it almost never happens at all, that a record hits you out of nowhere. Completely out of nowhere that is and with full impact. A record by a group of teenagers that you have never heard of on a label that didn't even exist before and that sounds like nothing you have ever heard before, for example. For me múm's debut album YESTERDAY WAS DRAMATIC - TODAY IS OK was such a rare thing.

Five years ago, I was working at a new job in a new city that didn't feel particularly welcoming. One evening a guy who ran a couple of Icelandic record labels, mostly known - if only by a rather small number of people - for their functional dance 12"s, arrived in a big rental car and handed me a copy of the album.

I was hooked the first moment I listened to it. YESTERDAY WAS DRAMATIC - TODAY IS OK not only became an unexpected hit at our office but provided solace and comfort when you needed it. It gave a feeling of home while away from home. It's a record that you unintentionally start humming to after a while, anticipating the many odd sounds and plenty joyful melodic fragments before they arrive.

"There Is A Number of Small Things", for example, starts off as a simple lullaby, growing more complex as it goes a long, before bursting into full bliss, while "The Ballad of the Broken Birdie Records" gives goose pimples from the beginning, enhanced by Kristin's distant sounding but emotionally affecting vocals.

Part of the attraction of the album is its mixture of analogue instruments such as harmonica, accordion and glockenspiel with digital clicks and cuts. But what makes it so beautiful is that at no point this combination feels constructed or forced. While listening to YESTERDAY WAS DRAMATIC - TODAY IS OK you don't care how it was made you're just enjoying that it exists.

Nothing can replace that feeling of discovering a record, a band, a new music for the first time. Today, if you should listen to YESTERDAY WAS DRAMATIC - TODAY IS OK for the first time (rereleased and remastered on Morr Music who have previously put out múm's remix ep PLEASE SMILE MY NOISE BLEED), you are more than likely to have already become familiar with múm's unique musical universe, a group who have so far succeeded in selling more copies with each successive album they released. Therefore it might not hit you out of nowhere but it will hit you nonetheless. It's simply a record that you don't want to be without once you've encountered it.

Heiko Hoffmann

Múm - Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know from 9,99 €

Two years after the release of their last album, eccentric pop maestros múm return with their fifth album proper, simply named Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know, a flickering candle of an album. The album is a much more laid back album than múm's most recent outings, more relaxed and quietly sad, often recalling sand running through fingers or ripples on a lake. And to an even greater extent than their previous albums, Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know is an ode to the light in its different shapes, from a fading bulb to the blinding sun.
Sometimes the music sounds naively utopic, but always manages to stay effortless and pure. As usual, the songs are brimming with unusual sounds, this time much of the songs revolve around a lightly prepared piano, hammered dulcimer, a string quartet, marimbas, guitars, ukuleles and in the background of a few of the songs one can hear Örvar's parent's parakeet singing with the piano.
The album was recorded in countless different places in four different countries, although most of it was done in múm's native Iceland. Gunnar Örn Tynes moved to a cabin in the countryside where much of the album sprang to life, but as always múm have a hard time staying put and recorded in both Estonia and Finland. In Estonia borrowed a beautiful, many hundred-year-old house in Leigo, a place of hundreds of lakes, where they wrote new songs and recorded with the Estonian Suisapäisa Mixed choir.
Much of the music was hatched in the middle of Iceland's recent political turmoil and uprising. The Icelandic government was forced to resign after intermittent civil unrest and the constant banging of pots and pans. By stretching the imagination, one can imagine a link between the turbulent political situation and the serene idealism hidden in the music.
The band or group or collective or whatever people want to call it consists on this album of Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar ˝óreyjarson Smárason, Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson (trumpet / piano/ keyboards/ string arrangements), Hildur Gu∂nadóttir (cello/vocals), Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (Vocals/ ukulele/ various), Róbert Reynisson (guitars/ukuleles) and Finlander, Samuli Kosminen (drums / percussion). Högni Egilsson, also joins in a few songs, sharing songwriting duties on one song and arranging choir for two others and Gu∂björg Hlín Gu∂mundsdóttir plays violin.

Múm - Prophecies & Reversed Memories 11,99 €

In conjunction with Múm's fifth album, Morr Music releases 'Prophecies & Reversed Memories': A 10inch, that contains one album track and two songs exclusive to this release. Three songs, which perfectly show the variety of Múm's music. Prophecies... is merely a naive and overly sweet chorus, that gets more and more euphoric in its repitition, while Amen Flutes turns out as an excentric and strange popsong once it has built up from a glorious mess of sound. At least Krippling shows the band's adult side - a heartwarming ballad: careful and fragile.