The Icelanders Cometh 

Iceland -- a volcanic isle roughly the size of Kentucky and just a couple of icebergs away from the Arctic circle. Home to long days and even longer nights, roughly 280,000 inhabitants (or 4,000 more than the city of Raleigh, NC), more book readers per capita than any other country on earth (cf. long nights, arctic weather), a potato-based liquor known as "Black Death," and more musicians than you can shake a polar bear at. Bjork and the Sugarcubes may have put Iceland on pop's musical map, but it's bands like Gus Gus, Sigur Rs, and Múm that make this frigid isle a hotbed of avant-pop. Creative Loafing looks at two bands -- one from Iceland, one from the US -- coming to the Neighborhood Theatre this week that embody the Icelandic spirit...

The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle finds A Safe Place
By John Schacht

The Album Leaf is big in Iceland. What's big in Iceland? Well, according to San Diego's Jimmy LaValle, the founder and only permanent member of The Album Leaf (who play the Neighborhood Theatre Friday), about "10 percent of the population" there buy his records. While those numbers may seem inflated, LaValle says that in Iceland it's virtually the "equivalent of a gold record."

Icelanders and the rest of us have another chance to sample LaValle's wares with A Safe Place, The Album Leaf's recently released (June 22) disc. While SubPop, his new label, hasn't broken down the sales figures yet, they were aware of LaValle's potential before signing him. A member -- until January 2003 -- of the San Diego-based, guitar-driven instrumental experimentalists Tristeza, LaValle had treated The Album Leaf (named after a Chopin piece) as his quieter side project. (The multi-dimensional LaValle is also the bassist for the gorgeously gloomy Black Heart Procession, and, in addition to his years in Tristeza, was also in post-punk noise gurus The Locust and beat-happy GoGoGo Airheart.)

But Iceland changed The Album Leaf's status. Or, to be more precise, Iceland's Sigur Rs did. Riding high on the success of their second record (and first US release), Ágætis Byrjun -- Iceland's second most popular musical export (after Bjork) invited a surprised LaValle to tour with them as The Album Leaf on their Fall 2001 tour (and practically every tour since). The Album Leaf's first record, 1999's An Orchestrated Rise to Fall, made a big impression with the right Icelanders, and it's not difficult to hear why. With a marvelously spacious sound, gentle drum and bass sampling, organic instrumentation (mostly keys, some guitar) and Eno-esque atmospherics, The Album Leaf's textural dreamscapes seem aptly suited for long nights and stark landscapes -- and not all that removed from the same sound bands like Sigur Rs and Múm are exploring.

But, in another example of The Album Leaf's stature with Icelandic musicians, there was a fundamental question to be decided before the two bands could begin their inaugural tour.

"They were actually wondering if they were going to have to open for me, which is pretty funny," LaValle says of the platinum-selling Sigur Rs.

Though The Album Leaf opened the dates, LaValle eventually wound up joining Sigur Rs on stage during their sets. And it was on that first tour that the foundation for A Safe Place initially came into focus. It also turned out to be the death of The Album Leaf as a side project, and the beginning of the next stage of the 26-year-old, classically trained LaValle's music career.

Since that first tour together, the members of Sigur Rs have suggested LaValle come to Iceland and record. It took a while to work out the particulars, but LaValle eventually accepted the open invitation and went to the North Atlantic isle for three separate, two-week-long recording sessions from August to October in 2003.

"I've always felt that the music I make is perfect for that kind of (Icelandic) setting," LaValle says.

Staying in the village of Mosfellsbaer and recording in Sigur Rs' studio -- an old empty indoor swimming pool from the 1930s -- LaValle spent most of his time in the studio alone or just with engineer Birgir Jon Birgisson. Along the way, various Icelandic musicians -- as well as two key members of Black Heart Procession -- came by to lend their talents to the proceedings.

The results, while basically similar in aesthetic to previous Album Leaf records, also differ in key ways. From the opening cathedral-like synth bells of "Window" -- which sounds like the music you might hear staring at a barren tundra from a low-flying plane's window -- there's an evanescent feel, a soft-focus of detail that virtually induces visual images of Icelandic terrain. In fact, on his current tour with members of San Diego's Via Satellite, a projectionist who also provides beats runs visuals synched to the music throughout the show.

The addition of vocals to several cuts (including LaValle's first foray into singing on three songs) greatly expands The Album Leaf's palette as well -- just about the only complaint you could level at the previous works might have been the limited instrumentation. In particular, Black Heart's Pall Jenkins'vocals really blur the line between ambient electronic music and melancholic post-rock, the former dominating earlier Album Leaf efforts.

By accepting the open invitation of good friends and recording in these unique, polar-opposite elements (can you figuratively get any further from Iceland than San Diego?), LaValle did indeed find a A Safe Place.

The Album Leaf play the Neighborhood Theatre Friday, with The Movies opening. Tickets are $10, and doors for the 8pm show open at 7pm.

Iceland’s Múm keep it cool, calm, and collected
By Timothy C. Davis

Like many of their countrymen -- Sigur Rs, Gus Gus, and The Leaves, to name a few -- the band Múm (25-year-old Gunnar Tynes, 27-year-old Örvar Smárason and 22-year-old Kristín Valtysdttir) are part of what has been dubbed the "Icelandic sound": equal parts stringed instruments, either minimal or double-speed percussion (or both), lots of electronic bleeps and blips, and breathy, delicate vocals that often function more as an additional instrument than anything else. These bands often use a sort of bastardized Icelandic/ American hybrid, "la-la" style baby talk, or else a brand new language altogether (see Sigur Rs). Due to the symphonic sweep of the music, vocals are used mostly for their emotional textures and color tones, not to further a narrative.

"I do sing in English, but you don't understand my English," Valtysdttir says. "On this album everything is sung in English -- or my way of singing English."

Like many of their contemporaries, Múm are a band that transcends language barriers, relying instead on the emotional tug of war between digital and analog, male and female, musician and instrument, and performer and audience. Expertly manipulating tones and frequencies and tempos like a storyteller uses rhetorical devices, Múm manage to construct a musical language that often says more than mere words ever could.

Interestingly, Iceland is perhaps the only foreign country to make a real dent in the indie rock world, despite boasting an oeuvre almost completely done in a foreign tongue (Bjork aside). Sure, there are hipsters with Serge Gainsbourg records, and more than a few would-be Japanophiles with Melt Banana and Eastern Youth discs, but Icelandic bands dwarf their sales -- hey, record store clerks need make-out music too!

For our purposes, we're talking about music people actually listen to. And listening is what Múm is all about.

Indeed, it's hard to talk about Múm without dwelling on their nationality.

A country that exudes archetypal poles of fire and ice, Iceland's bands are usually reviewed using all manner of topographical metaphor. The music is described as glacial and polished, or else cool and calculated. However, make too many generalizations based on geo- and sociopolitical landmarks, and you're venturing very close to the same mindset that gave Seattle the "grunge" label a decade or so back. Sure, Múm's music contains nothing approaching the sunny jangle of The Beach Boys or The Byrds, nor does it contain the desolate urban intensity of Detroit's Stooges and MC5. However, Detroit also gave us The White Stripes, a band marinated in Southern blooze, and California is home to none other than Jimmy LaValle, who -- in his incarnation as The Album Leaf -- sells more than his share of records in...Iceland. Home may be where the heart is, goes the old saying, but must it be where the art is, too?

In Múm's case, yes and no. The band's latest release, Summer Make Good (FatCat), was recorded by pal Orri Jonson (from fellow Icelanders Slowblow), and mixed at Sigur Rs' own studio, a structure converted from a swimming pool a few years back. Summer Make Good was written and recorded in a remote lighthouse near an isolated town on a Southwestern Icelandic peninsula.

"We didn't want to go to a studio because we wanted the sound of an old empty house," Valtysdttir says. "We wanted the sounds that live in old houses to be on the record, and that's why we also wanted to record on tape -- you can capture (that sort of thing). It was a really, really windy place and the house made a lot of sounds ... It was a really suitable place for the album to be made. I was really thankful for the town to let us stay there."

Such unusual locales were a natural fit for the band's eclectic mix of melodica, glockenspiel, accordion, iBook, keyboards, trumpet, viola, violin, bowed musical saw, pump organ, Chinese harp, and banjo. Recorded equally on ProTools and one-inch analog tape, the combined musical effect is dizzying (a state of mind enhanced by Valtysdttir's helium-high falsetto), but suggests less the surrounding landscape than it does the extremes Icelandic musicians go to in an effort to record their music.

Thanks to the long nights and harsh climate, book and record stores and pubs are the default meeting places for young Icelanders. Traditional recording studios are often hard to come by, so resourceful musicians band together to help out, offering their homes (and/or swimming pools and lighthouses), their opinions, and often, their talents. If one's not going to see a band, they're likely forming one, or else joining some friends for a free-form jam session. It's taking what you've been given, and making the best of it.

Which, in the end, is the secret to Múm's success, if not that of their country as a whole: taking rock formations and reconfiguring them through rock band formations. Using unlit winter days to explore the dark nights of the soul. Taking all the snow and ice and melting it into the clear, liquid clarity that only the purest works may boast. And all without worrying about record sales, cliquish grudges, and all the other such distractions that so often bog artists down.

It's a novel concept, really: when all else fails, let the music do the talking.

Múm play the Neighborhood Theatre Tuesday, with Slowblow and Mar opening. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Showtime is 7:30pm, and the doors open at 6:30pm.