MÚM
Early Birds: (A Compilation Of Early Recordings, Rare Music And Forgotten Songs From 1998-2000 Or Thereabouts)
Mm116
Morr Music 2012
15 Tracks. 72mins39secs

Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP | DLD iTunes: DLD

Icelandic electronic folksters múm have been pretty quiet since the release of their last album, Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know (2009) and the end of the tour that followed a year later. Despite the recent announcement that the band has been working on the score for Jack & Diane, a film due out later on in the year, which is said to feature a collaboration bwtween the Icelandic formation and Kylie Minogue, the appearance of a compilation, published on Morr Music, the band’s original label, to which they returned with Sing Along… can easily be taken as a stop gap between projects. This said, Early Birds collects a number of rare and previously unpublished material recorded between 1998 and 2001, at a time when the band consisted essentially of Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason.

Over the years, múm have released music on Morr, TNT Entertainment and Fat-Cat, and have morphed from a primarily electronic duo in the early days to a quartet with the addition of twin sisters Gyða and Kristin Anna Valtýsdóttir and a collective of musicians and singers for Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy (2007)  and Sing Along… (2009), following the successive departures of the Valtýsdóttir sisters. Continue Reading »

MÚM
Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know
MORR092
Morr Music 2009
12 Tracks. 49mins10secs

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Things have changed quite drastically since Múm landed on TMT Entertainment in 2001 with the hugely poetic and overly electronic Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK album, and the remix album that followed. The band was formed by Gunnar Örn Tynes, Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason toward the end of the nineties, and shortly after, twin sisters Kristín Anna and Gyða Valtýsdóttir joined them. Since, the band has gone through many changes. In 2002, Gyða left, followed a couple of years later by Kristín, leaving Tynes and Smárason to head a constantly changing line up, until the current one came together to record  Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, released on Fat-Cat in 2007. The album signalled quite a radical shift in musical direction as Múm appeared to leave their delicate electronic textures behind in favour of a much more acoustic sound, not that far apart from the magical kingdom of Danish ensemble Efterklang. Continue Reading »

B. FLEISCHMANN
Angst Is Not A Weltanschauung!
MORR085
Morr Music 2008
09 Tracks. 54mins48secs

Bernhard Fleischmann’s habitually dark electronic textures and minor key harmonics luxuriate in fresh, expansive grooves on Angst Is Not A Weltanschauung!, his most explicitly pop album yet.  An embryonic indie rock quality is whipped into shape on a number of pieces by stuttering drum machine hi-hats and cockily affirmative vocal twists.  At times the accessible minor key phrases evoke the grinding of large bodies and come off rather well.  The brooding, sexy male-female vocalizing of Last Time We Met At A T&tt Concert, for one, entwines effortlessly with a cavernous, tub thumping rhythm. Continue Reading »

BOBBY & BLUMM
Everybody Loves…
MORR081CD
Morr Music 2008
13Tracks. 43mins00secs

A leader of a pop-camp for teenage girls in Sweden by day, Ellinor Blixt (aka Bobby) teams up with Germany’s F.S. Blumm for Everybody Loves…, a small clutch of tracks recorded some fifty kilometres north of Berlin in a cabin near the edge of a forest.

The album evokes a tapestry of visions: the playful though subdued approach to harmony and layering stirs up warmth and violet sunsets while the echoes of beaten vibraphone and thumb piano nudging up against soft blades of guitar as they linger and roll slowly in a hazy ambience reminds of a Vermont spring. Continue Reading »

VARIOUS ARTISTS
A Number Of Small Things
MORR079CD
Morr Music 2007
36 Tracks. 154mins42secs

A Number Of Small Things, the sister label to Morr Music, gathers together the residues from their 7″ releases like little trinkets and presents them in this achingly compulsive compilation of unexpected pleasures. The album presents a stage on which older, more established artists present vivid re-imaginings of their bookmarks, while other, less exposed acts utter their first words with tentative excitement. Continue Reading »

SEABEAR
The Ghost That Carried Us Away
MORR 076CD
Morr Music 2007
12 Tracks. 44mins22secs

The debut full-length from Icelandic group Seabear consists of understated vignettes that center upon simple three-or-four-note acoustic guitar lines, which unfold and circle in the shifting light of successive sound washes. The harmonica and violin of Gudbjorg Hlin Gudmndsdottir provides the buoyant melodies with a firmer foundation with which to wrestle and coalesce; so too does the idyllic atmosphere of lightly brushed drums, flugelhorn, and slide-guitar, all of which, at some point or other, manage to consolidate a certain degree of independence in their category, tumbling to the fore, and thus ensuring a more elastic and varied development. Continue Reading »

RADICAL FACE
Ghost
MM069
Morr Music 2007
11 Tracks. 47mins46secs

Radical Face is the song-based project of Ben Cooper, better known as one half of electronically subverted indie-pop duo Electric President, which he formed with Alex Kane in 2000. The pair released their self-titled debut album on Berlin-based Morr Music last year. While Cooper has previously recorded an album under his Radical Face moniker, The Junkyard Chandelier in 2003, Ghost, released on Berlin-based imprint Morr Music, home of B.Fleischmann, Isan, American Analog Set and Lali Puna, is his official solo debut. Continue Reading »