Mariam The Believer

Mariam The Believer’s third solo album, Breathing Techniques, is released through Repeat Until Death (Cargo), Mariam Wallentin’s self-run label.

Mariam The Believer, the solo moniker of Mariam Wallentin, is a pop project with flavours of diverse genres and inspirations. There’s an air of jazz, a touch of soul, the receptiveness and enchantment of spiritual music, and the spacious richness of improvisation.

Breathing Techniques is an album showcasing Wallentin’s respect and devotion to air, breath, and space – conveying a feeling of openness to the world and to oneself. Together with Wallentin’s haunting and honest vocals, the musical arrangement is intimate yet persuasive. A tender harp, delicate strings, playful synthesizers, a flowing piano, and the ever-present drums in Wallentin’s musical world – acting as a beating heart throughout her music – all lend a succulent presence to the musical journey of every song. 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.

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 album echoes of influences from women in music from the past and now. There is a stroke of Alice Coltrane’s low-key spiritual recordings, the rhythmic improvisations of Meredith Monk, the airiness of Stina Nordenstam and the exploring vocal qualities of Sheila Chandra and Gal Costa. Wallentin has a spiritual, body-and-mind, relationship to breathing through her kundalini practice. As a trained kundalini teacher, she recognize the power of repetition and breath. While pregnant with her second child, Wallentin attended her Kundalini teacher training, growing life while at the same time giving birth to the compositions that was to become Breathing Techniques.