Icelandic Electronica Band Múm Revisit Their Playful, Ageless Debut, 20 Years Later

Before the Internet, tapping into a music scene was an adventure. There was no straight line – you couldn’t just belly flop into the endless well that is Spotify, Xiami, or one of the hundred other streaming sites. You couldn’t browse through myriad music sites to see what was trending. Instead, you discovered new music through word of mouth – via friends or more likely than not, sage older kids whose wisdom you soaked up. It was, as Gunnar Örn Tynes, one of the founding members of seminal Icelandic electronica group Múm, puts it: "A bit more personal."

Upon its release a week before the turn of the century, the band’s debut Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK, a seductive amalgamation of left-field bleeps and bloops and lush acoustic instrumentation, hardly made a ripple. However, while organic recommendations may not be as efficient as the unremitting churn of online content, they still have the magical ability to travel continents, and once word of the album's brilliance got out it didn't stay quiet for long.

"I was just 18 or 19 years old. It was just something we were doing in our bedrooms... having fun and playing around. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when it had been re-released in England and all over Europe, that we realized maybe we had something special," says Tynes.

And just like that, the band’s debut became a defining album for a new generation of music lovers looking to broaden their horizons. From the delicate glitches and soft piano notes, to the heartstring-pulling, wide-eyed curiosity, its influence still reverberates today.

To celebrate the album's 20th anniversary (and a new remaster release), the band, which at present includes Tynes, Örvar Smárason, and classically trained twin sisters Gyda and Kristín Anna Valtysdóttir, has hit the road again and swings by Omni Space this Sunday, Nov 24.

Iceland is no stranger to music sensations, and in 1999 the small Nordic country's scene was rife with world-class acts: Bjork had already been shaking the airwaves for well over a decade and Sigur Ros was fresh off their career-defining Svefn-G-Englar.

"The scene has also always been creatively active [since the '80s] but back then I felt like there was more eclectic, more strange stuff happening ... whereas today you kinda have to fall into certain categories to get heard. Pre-Internet people were just more into doing weirder stuff."

Multi-instrumentalist Gunnar, who now operates as a producer, recording engineer, and film score composer in Berlin is still bemused by the circumstances that brought Múm’s debut to life. "It was all very primitive. Today you can easily make a decent song on your phone – no problem. Back in those days, we couldn’t even work with audio within the computer unless you were recording in a fancy studio ... but we somehow put it together."

And while it’s easy to wrap up the album in a warm blanket of nostalgia and Icelandic romanticism – “People do project a lot of emotionality onto it because it's from Iceland, but I don’t think that's a bad thing,” says Gunnar – it’s amazing how well Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK holds up today. Alluring, innovative, and most importantly, seamless in its assembly, it’s an album that has aged like fine wine. And while the band’s palette has only grown deeper and richer over the past two decades, expanding their mix of emotional composition and playful IDM to new heights, their playfulness was present from the beginning: “I was kind of pleasantly surprised at what decisions we made early on in our career. In their essence, they’re very simple compositions but performing them again today, there are some odd signatures and things that you don’t really realize until you start to play it. Maybe because we were kids and we were taking our first stabs in music.”

A lot of the processes that went into their first release have dictated the band’s trajectory and methodology over the past 20 years. As Gunnar explains, “We kind of follow the music wherever it leads us and that’s why our albums maybe don’t have the same vibes even though the may have the same feel. It’s chaotic how we execute our music-making. There’s never been any captain of the ship – we let the wind sail us wherever we want to go and take it from there."

You can see Múm perform their debut Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK in its entirety on Sunday, Nov 24 at Omni Space. The show starts at 9pm and tickets cost RMB 260 on the door or RMB 220 advance.

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Images courtesy of the organizers