múm: they're so great!
For your viewing and listening pleasures, we present a brand spankin’ new video from the one and only MÚM! Set to the track Slow Down off 2013’s wonderful Smilewound LP, it features a naked drummer, an elemental woman and layers and layers of obscure literary and film allusions (try and see if you can spot ‘em all!). As for múm, the band recently announced that they will be playing a number of shows this year, starting off with an engagement in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 12.
Watch the video below, and then read on for some words from the creative team behind it.
The concept for the video evolved from a photo shoot the band did in Hólavallagarður, and we thought we would try to build a sort of otherworldly feel out of it. We had initially thought to base it on a ghost murder story theme from Morðin á Sjöundá, but laying all of that into a five minute sequence was too much of a play-act.
The main idea that emerged from our initial discussion at Fríkirkjan was that Samuli (the drummer) should be naked and covered in dirt, and we had to shoot him alone since he was flying to Finland the following day. So we shot what we called the ‘elemental man’ scenes with him on that cold November day in the graveyard, we did it quietly and kept him out of sight for the most part, as we wanted to be ultra-cautious in order to respect the surroundings.
We decided impromptu to shoot the ‘elemental woman’ (Gyða) out at Nesjavallaleið the following day, and we hadn’t appreciated just how bitter cold it was going to be out there. And the urban scenes were shot at the prototypical home of a Reykjavík City council member. Essentially what we ended up with was a man and a woman each caught in a netherworld, each seeking warmth, surrounding an urban interior scene of people who are a little bored, distracted and maybe looking for some meaning in stories and music.
Our directors have mostly film backgrounds and built in lots of layers of obscure literary and film allusions (Vertigo, Persona, the books, etc). But like life, in the end it’s just kind of random, has only the meaning you ascribe to it, and it all gets washed away in the end.
-F.D. Cristian and Elma Dögg Steingrímsdóttir
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