Published
Part 2
What role do electronic tools and instruments play for your creative process? What does your creative space / studio look like and what tools does it contain?
My sound work is pretty much just a few trusted orchestration plugins and mixing tools that my brother has passed on to me. I get Vertigo looking at his DAW!
I prefer just gathering samples and recordings for a specific project, toy with them and then start afresh. I have an electrical piano at home where I improvise, and some of it transfers onto the composition. It’s however important to me that the piano is at home, with no result-driven function.
In theory I’m a minimalist, but in practice my studio is filled with soft toys, acoustic panels, performance memorabilia, some instruments and a bunch of receipts that I need to sort out. There’s a box labeled ’Matilda’s electronics’ where I store sensors and an assortment of contact microphones, which is something I mainly use for sound installations- such as the 6-channel sound installation, Live and Breathe (2025) at Malmö Konsthall.
For this I recorded the institutions entire ventilation system and transformers during the gallery’s closing hours. The speakers were completely hidden, so the existing sounds of the space were just amplified, which left people visiting the exhibition writing me that they hadn’t been able to locate my work.
This definitely laid the ground work for another recent installation, Interiors (2026) at Lunds Konsthall for which I recorded sounds in historically contested public sites of sound-production in the city of Lund, and created emitting and absorbing sculptures made from acoustic panels, with inbuilt sensors that activated and modulated the sound according to the influx of light within the gallery.
But then some people told me that they hadn’t been able to hear the sound from the sculptures on a specific date. Sound in art institutions is always a catch-22.
It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?
I work concept-driven across disciplines, often starting with writing, so this is rather a chosen standard procedure for me. Even when the text disappears from the final presentation, it’s where I recalibrate and gather my thoughts.
I’m aware that this is far from the case for everyone, and am therefore also critical of standardised grant applications, as they emphasise the conclusive before the project has even taken shape. The written word is a very potent object! Still, so much of my studio time goes into writing them, and as a way of being cautious and when I can - I try to treat each application as an opportunity to develop an early idea.
I rarely apply to open calls, I find it overwhelming to tailor my work to a very specific institutional or curatorial profile. While I understand the democratic intentions behind open calls, I’m critical of how much free exposure institutions and platforms gain compared to the relatively few artists who receive the opportunities.
Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?
I pay attention to the endurance of a work for sure, and I insist on the long format where I feel it’s needed artistically.
For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. Few works these days, however, are performed beyond their premiere. What, do you feel, does this mean for composers, and the music they write, and how does this reality influence your own work?
This is really common practice as a performer operating in an art context as well, which I guess is resting on the tradition of performance being a ’happening’ and theatre a space for repetition.
I’m as of recently trying to break with this trend for my own practice by figuring out how to orchestrate and produce a tour for some of my performance work. Most often, performances are created within contexts, and with performers bound to a particular geographical place, so it’s a challenging task.
How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?
Since my musical compositions often are scores for a staged performance, I consider them part of the same universe with different medium requirements.
I play the piano without hitting record, because it’s a meditative practice to me. But it’s not really part of my practice to write a track for the finality of the track. I do envy those who can, but it’s not an artistically satisfactory approach for me. I’ve made a few singles that I value highly, but they were prompted by invitations and conversations with the commissioners such as Speed of an Arrow for Country Music, and Copy for Cover Crop.
My first album, Clones (2022), grew directly out of a commission of a performance for the nomadic project HTSU!? in Amsterdam. Just as I started to prepare for it, the pandemic hit, leaving me in an uncertain place of how I’d be able to perform it. In the meantime I found myself leaving my home in London for Sweden, facing -20 degrees and offered to share a music studio with my brother. It was a strange space of isolation and familiarity, of wondering how a life could change that rapidly and yet fall into an order.
I channeled this through writing a fictional narrative about a narrator stuck in a never-ending winter and a nocturnal visitor, appearing in dreams only to remind her of a past slowly fading away in her waking life. The production budget went into producing an album with a release in Amsterdam, and upon this I started receiving requests to play live shows.
I was like wait a second - you’ve misunderstood me, I’m not a musician! Perhaps it’s an avoidant trait of not taking responsibility over my actions and gaslighting the spectator. I’d also describe it as a gendered tendency and a class trait rooted in growing up without any professional expectations. Making professional claims is very performative to me, but since I’m a performer I also succumb to some of its rules.
My album Shelf Life (2026) started as a short story for an exhibition, and was later scored for a performance, and later made into an album release and CD.
Understandably - there is currently a requirement and tendency of being an entertainer with all of these hidden aces up your sleeve. As composers we need to say no to all of this when it doesn’t serve the intention of the sound.
To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
This is a difficult question to answer, partly because the pace of technological development seems to exceed the time available to develop a meaningful discourse around it and partly because AI cannot be separated from the political conditions in which it is being developed. Such as the resurgence of fascism and labour extraction.
I’m obviously wary of narratives that present these tools as autonomous or neutral forms of intelligence, detached from the infrastructures and interests that produce them.
At the same time, I think it’s important for artists to engage with these technologies critically and obliquely, rather than simply love or hate them.
The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
Of course there is a beauty in the fickle live moment, but I really agree with the act of archiving ephemera and time based arts.
Historically, this has been poorly archived and through active archives of it we can not only learn from each other’s experiences but also be considerate of what we choose to remember.
