current projects
QARIN WIKSTRÖM
Singer / Musician / Composer / Lyricist / Educator
Qarin Wikström has been an active part of the avant-garde and experimental music scenes in Copenhagen, Denmark, for over two decades. She is an experimental musician who works with hardware electronics and voice. Combining composition, improvisation, and sound experimentation, she performs both solo and in various collaborative constellations.
She is currently active in collaborations such as de Heney/Wikström, Müntzing/Wikström, Sekten, and TING, as well as in ad hoc constellations and performative projects.
Qarin has released more than 20 albums as a composer or co-writer, spanning genres from alternative pop and avant-garde jazz to Swedish troubadour songs and freely improvised music. These releases have appeared in a variety of formats, including tape, vinyl, CD, matchbox, headband, and video miniatures. She has been nominated multiple times for the Danish Music Awards, including for UP UP UP (solo album), Ping Pong Punktum (Müntzing/Wikström), and Earth Core (Shitney).
She has composed music for opera, theatre, and contemporary dance, and has toured in Scandinavia, Europe, Japan, and the United States with various collaborations, performing both improvised and composed music. Qarin is a faculty member at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, where she teaches Artistic Development.
Over the past decade, she has focused her musicianship primarily on a sound-exploratory practice in which manipulated voice plays a central role. This work is expressed through freely improvised music, performative concepts, and composition.
de Heney / Wikström
A performance by de Heney / Wikström opens a sound world of woody creaks, groaning resonance and sheer textures. Their music blends and merges the acoustic and the electronic, weaving the tactile with the immaterial to create shifting sonic landscapes that feel both intimate and otherworldly.
Nina de Heney and Qarin Wikström are two singular artists in the Scandinavian improvisation scene. Each is known for an uncompromising musicality, a deeply personal artistic language, and a refined sensitivity to interplay. When they began working together in 2018, their connection was immediate: curious, direct, and full of shared instinct. Since then, they have cultivated a duo that explores sound with fearless attention and an ever-evolving sense of discovery.
Their debut album QOMOLANGMA, released on Outerdisk in 2023, has been praised for its immersive depth. As Eyal Hareuveni (Salt Peanuts) wrote:
“Acoustic electronics meet electronic acoustics in an inspired and most touching dream state. De Heney and Wikström do not only mirror their most immediate instincts and their vulnerable expressions and vibrations but suggest a cosmic mirror of eternal creation, from the heavenly Mother Earth Goddess to our daily lives.”
Qarin Wikström: voice/electronics
Nina de Heney : double bass/cymbal
Herman Müntzing / Qarin Wikström
Herman Müntzing has been working with electronic and acoustic devices since the late 1980s, while Qarin Wikström has explored them since the 2000s. They began performing together in 2014, forming a duo dedicated to embracing and celebrating the moment.
With a playful approach to sound, beats, and texture, they immerse themselves in chaotic, danceable, and minimalist processes. Their first release, Ping Pong Punktum — a book and cassette edition — came out in 2020 to international acclaim. The album was nominated for a Danish Music Award, and one of its tracks was featured on The Wire magazine’s Tapper 55.
Some quotes from Danish and international media:
“…a brilliant little cross-media work” Passive/Aggressive
“It's joyful, sad, pleasant, annoying, strange and familiar.” VITAL weekly
“…now abstract, post experimental, anti ambient, space escapism” -jazzhalo
“It acknowledges darkness without surrendering to it. It allows absurdity to sit beside despair. And it trusts that curiosity, that rare and stubborn quality, is still enough to keep the conversation going.” -chaindlk
Herman Müntzing – electronics, machines, keys
Qarin Wikström – electronics, keys, voice
TING - sound performance with everyday objects
Michaela Turcerová, Sarah Buchner, and Qarin Wikström collaborate in this trio to explore everyday objects and gestures as material for composition. The trio aims to expand the boundaries of sound and perception — where the familiar becomes extraordinary and the mundane becomes strangely supernatural — inviting the audience into a curious sensory experience.
TING have a continuously growing repertoire, and have so far composed and presented the pieces Chairs – the art of seating, Unfolding the plastic foil, Un-boxing, Roll/Bounce and Gravity.
Michaela Turcerová - things
Sarah Buchner - things
Qarin Wikström - things
