Mariam Wallentin
About this Artist
Mariam Wallentin is an artist with a big heart, as thoughtful as she is musically bold. An Alice Coltrane for our time. Soulfulness meets music that makes us feel and think. With musical roots partly in improvisation and new music, partly in pop and soul, Wallentin’s career has crossed a number of multifaceted territories; Wallentin is one half of the vocal-and-drum duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums, who has over time made an impact in the world of musicians, focusing on honest and raw compositions structured around vocal melodies and rhythm patterns. The duo have collaborated with and supported artists like St Vincent, Joanna Newsom, Mica Levi and Caribou. Wallentin is also one of the creative forces and composers for the jazz-big-band Fire Orchestra and has collaborated with international choirs, string ensembles, and symphony orchestras world-wide, she has sang for Björk at the Polar Music Prize and has been in an experimental opera touring stages such as the Royal Opera House and Holland Festival. Wallentin has worked with renowned musicians such as Feist, Damien Rice, Hildur Gudnadottir, Lykke Li, and saxophone-player Mats Gustafsson to name a few. She has won the Swedish Manifest prize, the Jazzkatten prize, has been nominated for the Nordic Music Prize and several times for a Swedish Grammys.
With his uncompromising approach to music, Wallentin also started her solo-project Mariam The Believer, in order to focus his expression into a more pop-oriented project, but with an air of jazz, the touch of soul, the receptiveness and enchantment of spiritual music and the spacious richness of improvisation. Mariam The Believer has released two acclaimed full length albums on her own label Repeat Until Death, and has a third album being released in 2024, named Breathing Techniques. Taking a view on the most ordinary and natural – like breath – Breathing Techniques brings the mundane into an esoteric perspective. Wallentin has used the act of breathing as a vehicle, bringing awareness to her astonishment of her everyday surroundings. Breathing Techniques is a weave of mantras, a guide to seeing and registering the small things, the tiny animals, the elements, the presence, and the precious. The sound is close yet atmospherical, a musical landscape that opens up as the music evolves through subtle progressions, repetitions and sometimes seemingly sporadic arrangements. A setting reminiscent of an updated classical chamber orchestra, fronted by Wallentin ́s singing, breathing life into the wonder of vulnerability and care that is the littlest of everyday life.