Marta Forsberg: A Certain Softness
On hyperpop, longboarding, queer romance books and getting into clubbing in your mid-30s
With her newest solo album Archaeology of Intimacy, Swedish-Polish sound artist Marta Forsberg is making a courageous step towards slightly more accessible, song-oriented work.
Over the past decade, the Berlin-based composer released pieces on labels like Warm Winters Ltd., XKatedral and Superpang; a trained violinist who studied composition at conservatories in Stockholm and Warsaw, she has also been creating installations and working closely with choreographers.
Archaeology of Intimacy is not quite a pop record. The music is still experimental in form and sound. It’s a cycle of seven dreamy, vocal-focused songs that feel like futuristic folk music viewed through a post-hyperpop lens.
I spoke to Marta Forsberg about growing up in a small town five hours north of Stockholm, playing in a band with Kali Malone and Ellen Arkbro during her university days, and finally starting to enjoy clubbing in her mid-30s.
Marta, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?
One memory that comes up is when my father would pump up the volume on the stereo in the kitchen. He had some favorites like Neil Young, who is also one of my heroes, and The Grateful Dead – that kind of music. He’d just turn the volume up super high on his favorite songs. I was five or six and I’d put my hands over my ears, like, “This is too much!” He would just dance by himself and make fun of me.
Sounds like your dad was a bit of a hippie.
Oh, totally. I don't even get how my mother and him got together, with her coming from Poland and being very religious, and him being a Swede and an atheist. But somehow they were both hippies – now I can see many like connections, like in the way they enjoy life.
Growing up in Sweden, did you visit Poland often?
Yeah, every year in the summer, my mother would take me and my siblings, and we’d go there. My father would also come, but he was working as an archeologist, so he was usually on some excavation site in the summer. I grew up bilingual, so my mother would speak Polish with us, and my father Swedish. We went to a Swedish school, but my grandmother from Poland would come and visit a lot, and I would talk to her in Polish as well.
What kind of musical influence came from your mother?
She listened to the Beatles. She had a ZZ Top record that she loved. She played some Polish folk rock from the 1960s and 1970s, which is really beautiful. And she would also listen to classical orchestra music, like Bruckner. Music was present throughout my childhood, but for my parents, it wasn't part of their identities. They just had some favorite bands, and they would listen to them sometimes.
When did you start your musical training?
I started playing the violin when I was six, after seeing one of these plastic things that you could press different buttons on, and it would play by itself. I thought this was super cool, so I wanted to play a real violin. I don't come from a very musical family – no one was playing instruments, but I got a lot of encouragement from my parents to continue playing when I had my lows. I became part of a small kids orchestra in middle school, which was exciting and fun.
At one point you switched to viola, right?
I play both, but the violin was always my main instrument. Somehow people always needed a viola, and it wasn't so important that I wasn't super good at it, so I did that in different constellations. When I was studying in Stockholm, we could borrow instruments from the school for free. Me and my friend, we had this viola that we shared, and when we finished our studies, we kept it for another five years or so. At one point they realized that an instrument was missing, so we had to return it. That’s when I stopped playing viola, which is sad. It's so expensive to buy a good instrument like that, so I just stick to my violin now.
Were you also into popular music in your teens?
Yeah, experimental electronic pop music like The Knife was a huge influence on me throughout high school and later as well. We actually started a band in high school, me and five friends, and I played in this band for ten years. It was some sort of folk-rocky, kind of proggy thing. We’d practice two or three times a week. We were very ambitious.
You didn’t grow up in Stockholm though, right?
No, I lived in the small town of Härnösand, 500 kilometres [310 miles] north of Stockholm.
I imagine long, dark winters…
…so much snow, so much darkness. And then in the summer, a lot of light. I go back at least two or three times a year these days.
I was talking to Ellen Arkbro recently. She told me that Kali Malone, Maria W Horn, you and her were all in this band, Hästsköttskandalen, back in the 2010s.
That’s so funny that you talked to her about it! We don't talk about this time so much. I'm still very good friends with both Maria and Ellen though. There was a fifth member, Elsa Bergman, an awesome jazz double bass player. The band formed while we were at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Maybe Kali had the initial idea to form this band. Maria and I, we actually come from the same city and had been playing together before. We would all meet in each other’s homes and just play together, very low key and very intimate. Then we got access to rehearsal rooms at the academy, so we could have proper equipment. We recorded and released an album. And then this band slowly fell apart, mainly because we moved to different countries and everybody started pursuing their solo work. We had been mashed together for such a long time, so I think people just wanted to do their own thing.
Which composers had the biggest influence on your solo work?
During my studies, there was a lot of talk about rediscovering work by female or trans composers. I would do my own research on Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue. All this long-form, drone-based music and deep listening practice is still an important backbone in how I relate to music. Also just having these older female role models. Pauline was still alive when I was studying, so just knowing that she did this her whole life, and that she was able to form a whole world around her sound was really inspiring and made things feel real and possible. At the time I also started being interested in my Polish roots, so I would go back and listen to [Krzysztof] Penderecki and other Polish classical composers.
The first work of yours I heard was Light Colours in Jyderup – a fascinating piece, which came out in 2021. Can you talk about its genesis?
Like many of my releases, it was music from my archive. It comes from this sound installation I made. It wasn't even supposed to be listened to on headphones or speakers. I made it during an artist residency in Denmark. I was actually struggling to make a new work for this residency, so I just took an old piece I had and changed the samples from violin to voice, first using my own voice, and then I realized I had access to these music students at this school, so I asked them to record their voices. I replaced my voice with theirs, and this is what came out.
It was such a revelation for me. It's the same material, but the feeling is so physical, and there’s so much vulnerability. The piece became much more accessible as well. From that moment on, I was excited about working with the human voice. The piece really opened up a portal. Before that, voice wasn’t my focus. It's interesting that you bring it up, because for me, it’s just a little release from my archive, but it was actually extremely formative.
The voice is a central part on your new album Archaeology Of Intimacy on Warm Winters Ltd., which feels like a bit of a culmination of your work up to here – but also your most accessible album. Not to say it’s a pop record, but almost.
Totally, I agree. I'm super happy about it. It was one of these works that just really came together by itself. I was in a flow state most of the time, so the pieces just kind of landed. It’s also a record that came from collaboration. At one point I invited Ludwig Wandinger, who is also based in Berlin, to help me produce it. And he took his time to really open his heart to this music. He had some fantastic input that truly formed the album.
The sound palette is quite restrained – there’s just analog synths, fretless bass and voice. Was it Ludwig’s idea to strip it back that much?
Well, originally I’d asked him if he wanted to play drums on it, so I actually had ideas of adding more instruments, not less. My partner said that I could make a whole little opera out of this. This could have been fun too. When you’re making such a project, you just have to make certain decisions and they can lead the result in totally different directions. But yeah, I also feel like it's done now.
The press text says that at one point you were just accepting the sketches as final versions. Often we’re striving for perfection when the real humanity lies in the imperfections.
When I started adding my voice to these songs, I did it just for sketching, and I always planned to ask a real singer to re-record these parts later. I actually did that on three songs, where I asked [countertenor] Rupert Enticknap and [singer/dancer] Ella Bender to sing them. Well, Rupert even improvised and added new musical material on top. But I remember that halfway through recording, I met with Ludwig, and I showed him a song which had my voice on it, but I told him a friend is gonna sing it. He was surprised and confused, like, “Why don't you just use this version? You already sang it.”
Before that, whenever I’d used my voice, I’d processed it so much that it wouldn’t sound like my voice, more like something otherworldly. And whenever I tried something like that, he’d immediately be like, “Can you turn off the pitch? I'm just curious to hear how it sounds without it.” So we’d listen to the raw recording, and I’d be like, “See? It clearly doesn’t work.” But he’d be like, “No, this is great. Just keep it exactly like this.” I was shocked! It’s been a learning process, but he completely changed my mind in that regard. I decided that the raw material is the real material.
It does give the music more personality, similar to the effect when Astrid Sonne suddenly sang on her last album Great Doubt.
Right! I hadn't expected her to sing, because she had always done this instrumental, droney composition type stuff. And then all of a sudden, she was writing actual songs, singing them herself. It was a bold, conscious step into a certain direction. She took it, and it paid off in a way. It's very inspiring. I remember when it came out, I was like, “This is so brave and cool and fantastic and new.”
You’ve been working a lot with dancers and choreographers in the last few years. How has that informed your work?
It’s been extremely formative for my ideas of sound, physicality, stage presence and movement. I’ve been working with Sindri Runudde, a dancer from Sweden, and they are visually impaired. Talking to them about the relationship of sound, body and movement really expanded my idea of how I compose. It just gave me that other perspective. Because I work with dancers so much, it felt very natural to ask Ella [Bender] and Agnes [Schneidewind] to be part of the record. I also wanted Sindri to be part, which they will actually be, now that I received some funds to turn this record into a dance production as well.
Were there other things that influenced this album on a musical level?
Definitely. I'm turning 36 this year, and two years ago, I was like, “Now I want to go clubbing.” I always loved dancing, but I also liked sleeping, you know? [laughs] But then I totally got into the experimental hyperpop scene, and I didn’t have anyone who’d go out to see these artists and DJs with me, so I’d just go by myself. Everyone else was like, “We were young in the 2000s, we danced enough, go have fun.” So I went alone and found new friends who’d start going out with me. It gave me some sort of courage to express myself differently. I discovered a deep sensuality that felt super optimistic – this music feels like the dancing on the ruins. But through listening to this music and going to these parties, I started feeling slightly more hopeful.
I also started skating again, longboarding, which I did a lot when I was younger. So I was riding my longboard, listening to this music, going out to the clubs, and reading queer romance books. The album title Archaeology of Intimacy is pointing towards these experiences of relearning and reconnecting, of a certain softness, curiosity and non-judgment. My senses just became very highly attuned to beauty, to finding euphoria in the everyday. There’s definitely an element of escapism in all of this as well, with all the wars and conflicts, the pain and suffering around us.
I deeply relate to all of what you were just saying.
Yeah, I think many do. I talked to other people about this, and they found their own strong light to go towards. I think especially in times like these, you need to be able to hold on to something that really means something to you.
Marta Forsberg’s Archaeology of Intimacy is out now on Warm Winters Ltd.
I was listening to the actual intimacy of Bramble’s Charcoal when I started reading this post, excited to hear what you were talking about I had to laugh as the electrocuted drone sounds of Forsberg’s album shocked me back to reality.