Here's the setup: Icelandic foursome, described on their record label's website as "painfully ordinary kids from a middle class background," hand over two new tracks to Germany's Thomas Morr, proprietor of underground electronic phenom Morr Music. The two original tracks, as well one brief reprise, do not stray far from Múm's pastoral electronics as instated on this year's stunning Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today is OK. Morr passes the tracks off to some of his finest tweakers: Styrofoam, Isan, Phonem, Christian Kleine, Arovane, and B. Fleischmann. Result: forty-five more minutes of electronic bliss.
Please Smile My Noise Bleed works much like a film soundtrack, with its first two cuts, "On the Old Mountain Radio" and "Please Sing My Spring Reverb," setting the themes that will be reiterated throughout. (The rest of the album consists of remixes of these two.) While the basic elements present on these new tracks-- diced voices, schizophrenic clicks, light music-box-like synths-- aren't particularly neoteric, their melodies, rather than the sounds themselves, are repeatedly reconstructed as the album's centerpiece. This isn't to say that the timbre of the instruments on these opening two tracks should be disregarded, but the purity of the near-sine-wave tones promotes the clarity of their melodies.
While the remixers tend to lose this mentality, they generally preserve the idyllic atmosphere proposed by the originals. Isan's "Catena Mix" of "Please Sing My Spring Reverb" distorts and echoes the melody while adding an overdrive to the drum track. Christian Kleine's "Sole Mix" of "On the Old Mountain Radio" replaces the simple schizophrenic clicks with an elementary drum machine track that longs to sound acoustic, but ultimately, with its airy hi-hat and wisps, falls nearer to Aphex Twin. In fact, the tendency for many of these remixes is to replace the focus of the melody with percussive elements. As a result, a sense of movement that's absent in the originals-- which appear more or less sedentarily contemplative-- is instilled. But even with Múm's melodic base taking the passenger seat, the movement created is anything but turbulent.
What's most intriguing is how well this record actually works as a whole. This can partially be attributed to the 1\xBD-minute interlude, "Flow Not So Fast My Old Mountain Radio," which reaches for something completely different with accelerated and interlocked synth arpeggios. The melodic lines resemble harps, but the synth remains in no-attack, sine-wave airspace.
This track aside, the theme and variation scheme does hinder some elements, but it never approaches tedium. In fact, five of the six remixes are of "Please Sing My Spring Reverb," and the vitality of the theme never wanes. The work of the remixers is also balanced in the opposite sense so that there's a sense of coherency that defies the tracks sounding disparate. One gets the feeling that the remixers respected the intentions of the originals enough to retain them in their own versions.
The album closes with Bernard Fleischmann's outstanding mix of "Spring Reverb," which approaches organic sound in a way most of these other tracks don't. It begins with voices extracted from near the end of the original, but by being left untreated, they become stark in contrast to the static Fleischmann throws in every few measures. Much of the original's tinkling bell melodies are removed, and the drums are brought up to support the voice. Eventually, the mix collapses into an amalgam of looped voices, creating an eerie yet moving effect before it glitches jerkily into a complete stop.
Noise Bleed begins and ends with manipulated human voices, reflecting that Múm demonstrate the ability to alter the spectrum of fabricated electronic sound in a natural way that resembles direct expression. These remixes, while rarely true to the originals in a natural sense, manage to maintain this humanity for the most part, and in some cases, magnify it. It's a testament not only to the talent of Morr Music's roster, but also to the rapid evolution of electronics.
