Nico Muhly

First: read our review of Nico Muhly’s excellent new record, Mothertongue.

Second: your interest (hopefully) piqued, track that shit down. Spend a little time with it, let it overwhelm you.

Third: join us as Nico dishes a glut of insight into his music, his influences, and his upcoming tour:

CMG’s Conrad Amenta (CMG): I feel like one of the ideas your record speaks to is an interplay of narrative possibilities, or the construction of messages—from the heteroglossic conversations like those in the “Mothertongue” suite, to a more traditional folktale, like the one that gradually emerges throughout “The Only Tune.” Can you talk a little bit about if and how you intended for these concepts of narrative to be connected? Did you start writing Mothertongue wanting to say something about storytelling?

Nico Muhly (NM): So, there were a few things I was thinking about with this album, and you correctly observe that narrative/journey is one of them. There are three basic structures at play. In “Mothertongue,” it wants to feel like navigating a library, browsing a card catalogue or dealing with a foreign taxonomic system: this is the narrative that governs how you move through, say, the American Museum of Natural History. Then, “The Only Tune” is a big folksong that has its own internal narrative to it, and what I wanted to do was make explicit the violence and aggressiveness and infanticide and sororicide and all that shit that’s built into a lot of the folk idiom. For whatever reason, I feel like the modern performance tradition of folk music sometimes glosses over this raunch and guts content in favor of a sort of Kumbaya upside down smile. “Wonders” is a much more difficult narrative structure, and it’s one that has more to do with jetlag, drunkenness, and tedium. I was trying for a very explicitly “resistant” structure to analyze, because I was referencing all these musical sources from the 16th century, before we started believing in the romantic arc that is so integral to travel narratives (“Started at home—went abroad, learned things, fought dragons—Came home, changèd.”)

CMG: I’m curious about the terms you use to describe the three narrative structures on the album; it seems each are displaying a tension of opposing forces. On “The Only Tune” the violence, as you said, is overt in the narrative, if not in the way it’s been represented and whitewashed in the history of folk music; in “Mothertongue” it’s more embedded, but you talk about systems that dictate the way in which one is forced to interact; “Wonders” seems to combine subtlety and the overt in places, seeming almost belligerent, alienated, and at odds with its own formality. If there really is opposition and difference working throughout the album was it your intention to tie that explicitly to travel? Is that grounded in experiences you’ve had as a touring musician?

NM: Everything you’re saying seems totally true, but it wasn’t that conscious a decision. All three pieces use “extremes,” but “Wonders” is the only one that actively references this travel thing—basically, I was thinking about how extreme travel is now when it’s so comfortable, and what it must have been like for somebody like Thos. Weelkes to even imagine another country to say nothing of visit it. I’m obsessed with those renaissance travel documents—Mandeville, all that shit. Anyway, I wanted to create a jetlagged space, a big headache, in that piece. It’s most explicit at the ending, with those foghorn brass and those confusing, shifting chords.

My experience as a touring musician is pretty limited, but I travel a lot to conduct, to work with other musicians, to collaborate, etc. When I was a kid I traveled a LOT.

CMG: Where are you living now, and do you feel like it has an effect on the way you compose (or listen) to music? Do you find yourself a part of a “scene” where you are?

NM: I live in Chinatown right now, in New York City. I’m one of those annoying people who thinks that New York is the center of all existence in the universe, but I also leave town a lot, so I appreciate it more when I’m here. It sounds cliché but the energy of the city has a lot to do with how I write. I really thrive on the chaos of Chinatown, too, and not being able to speak the language helps. That said, a lot of Mothertongue (most, in fact) was made in Iceland, which is a much more severe landscape, and more conducive to reflective thought than New York…

CMG: I can see that; when I was last in New York I spent a lot of time in Chinatown and, for me, it made New York more relatable than the other places I was going, albeit as a tourist.

Popular Icelandic music, at least from my thoroughly Western perspective, seems to have found itself as superficially understood as, say, Australian music; a few acts are propped up as representative and all new acts are compared to the standard they set. I know that, as a Canadian, I probably wouldn’t take it too lightly to having every new band that comes out my hometown compared to Tom Cochran. Do you have any observations regarding how Icelandic music is listened to and understood in, say, New York? Given your time there, what would you recommend for those indie fans who might only know about Sigur Rós, Björk, Múm?

NM: There is a shitload of great Icelandic music. I think the biggest “step” is that popular music there is happening now more in Icelandic. With Björk, her singing in English was key to becoming exportable. I would say that I’m the most excited about two bands there now, Sprengjuhöllin and Hjaltalín.

Also worth checking out would be Ólöf Arnaldsdóttir (who goes by ólöf arnalds) who is genius. Really really clever folk stuff, mandolin, ukelele.

Now, as for how it’s listened to, I honestly can’t claim to understand it. I think Björk is, like, the most genius thing that ever happened. I also think the new Sigur Rós album is amazing, so I have no objections to people lining up around the block for that shit. Múm, too, I think has a really specific emotional resonance that people are responding well to. I think there are some, like, scary Icelandic Music Fans, but aren’t there those people for everything? It’s the same thing in the Opera world!

CMG: I’d like to ask a question that will make it even more obvious that I’m sitting somewhere outside the classical music discussion. I’m very interesting in the idea of contemporary classical, or if that, as a concept, is contradictory or untenable. One record I’ve lost my mind over this year is an Ottawa group named Kingdom Shore, whose style is very reminiscent of Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Since I’m operating in indie rock circles, there’s a preset vocabulary here that almost demands that groups like Kingdom Shore be described as “experimental,” even though the referents are pretty clear.

When you write, are you cognizant of being part of what indie music circles might think of as a “contemporary” classical, or do you prefer to think of your music as a continuation of more canonical threads? Or does it even matter? Are either of these mindsets preferable, in your mind, when listening to Mothertongue?

NM: For me it doesn’t even matter. I sort of don’t fuck with Genre as a concept. As far as I’m concerned, “style” is sort of like that weird genetics/where you come from argument. Like, I’m “from” Vermont, my mother’s French, my dad’s German-American, and there is no escaping that. Whatever I do is going to be either a continuation of or a reaction to that basic data. Also, the way I see it, ten minutes I spend trying to figure out how what I do relates to anything or not is ten minutes I could have spent writing more music!

CMG: How do you feel about Speaks Volumes now that it’s had a couple of years to gestate?

NM: I feel awesome about it! It was such a good time in my life, making that album. It feels like a weird little utopian book. I have a lot of perspective on it and in retrospect I would love it to have a slightly more bassey presence but that’s a compositional issue. That’s why Mothertongue is like, all 808 all the time.

CMG: Regarding the upcoming tour: do you think the two albums will lend themselves to being performed together, or does each sort of require its own space? And how do you plan to reproduce some of the songs from these albums live?

NM: I think they work great together; we’ve done various incarnations of various things before. And we are going to do new stuff, too, off of a yet unnamed third album, as well as some études I wrote for solo viola and organs. In terms of realizing the songs live, for “The Only Tune” we just do a lot of sampling and a lot of live hair brushing and things. It’s different each time we do it, though.