Band der Woche: White Birches

White Birches ist das schwedische Duo Jenny Gabrielsson Mare und Fredrik Jonasson. Seit der Gründung im Jahr 2013 erschaffen sie Klangwelten voller Kontraste – dunkel und tröstend, fragil und kraftvoll zugleich. Mit ihrem neuen Album A New Reign reflektieren sie persönliche Verluste, Wandel und den fortwährenden Versuch, im Chaos des Lebens Licht zu finden. Im Interview sprechen Jenny und Fredrik über ihre musikalische Reise, den Einfluss von Natur und Emotionen auf ihr Schaffen und darüber, wie Schmerz zu schöpferischer Kraft werden kann.

Foto 1: © Ekaterina Iakiamseva

Who is behind White Birches, and how would you describe yourselves beyond music?
Jenny: White Birches is Fredrik Jonasson, who tends to samplers and synths, and me, Jenny Gabrielsson Mare, who takes care of pianos, guitars and vocals. How would I describe myself? I am exhaustingly creative, enjoy all things hedonic; still, I love a perfect spreadsheet in Excel.
Fredrik: I’m just an ordinary guy with a day job, a partner and a dog.

How did you meet, and what made you decide to start the project?
Fredrik: I was running a club back in 2011 and booked Jenny when she had just released her first solo album. We kept in touch, and after I asked her to sing on a song for my own solo project, we decided to do an EP together. We ended up forming White Birches in 2013, and the rest is history.

When did music first become a part of your life? Was there a moment when you fell in love with sound?
Fredrik: I think I started loving music before I could walk. When I was maybe five or six years old, I could sit for hours and play singles from my mother’s collection. One of my earliest memories is „Sukiyaki“ by Kyu Sakamoto, and I thought it sounded magical. I still think so. I’ve never thought about it before, but maybe that’s when I started being fascinated by sound. I brought it from my childhood home and I have it at home. I still play it now and then, and it’s extremely scratchy. It’s unbelievable that my mother let me play it like I did, but I’m grateful that she did.
Jenny: My experience is not that different; I’ve been singing and abusing instruments as long as I can remember. I have always felt things very deeply, with emotions overflowing. Music and sound have always been both a trigger for emotions and a way to channel emotions. I don’t know if that makes sense, but sound, rhythm, and melodies have always been important, if not crucial, just to exist.

Bildquelle Foto 2 & 3: White Birches 

What are you looking for in music? What are the boundaries that you look to explore with music?
Jenny: I need music to move me. Both the music I listen to and the music I make. I enjoy sounds that resonate, that open up windows to other worlds and emotions. I can appreciate abstract, clever compositions. But that is not what grabs me. Emotion. Disruption. Rawness. Honesty. Dissonance. It must somehow be physical. A bass that rattles your ribcage, a high pitch note that makes you shiver, a thread of words that cuts right through your heart. I sound like a 17th-century poet I know… the drama of it all.
Fredrik: I’m not sure I’m specifically looking for anything really. Music strikes me rather than me looking it up in search of something. Of course, I have periods when I’m curious about certain genres and actively search within them, but I have a hard time generally setting preferences. It’s different when it comes to creating my own music. Then I want to convey emotions more than anything else. I am also extremely meticulous about sound. I am fascinated by music that has a personality manifested in sound. I think we’re quite good at it.

If you had to describe your music without using any musical terminology, how would you portray it?
Fredrik: Dark, rebellious, comforting.
Jenny: Full of contrast, darkness and light, fragile but commanding.

What themes are you currently drawn to in your work?
Jenny: In the beginning we were more focused on themes and concepts. This time around the process of writing was more important. And life was allowed to influence each song. Unfortunately, that meant the common thread, or theme, running through many of the songs is grief, which comes in many forms. This goes without saying, but grief is of course nothing we are drawn to; it is more unescapable. Right now, we don’t know what the future holds and what to explore next. Maybe we will write an album about puppies and sunshine…

Which person, artist or incident inspired you when you first started making music?
Fredrik: This is a difficult question. Everything I had listened to and liked probably drove me to it, but new wave and synth music in the mid-80s got its claws into me when I was at the age when you are most receptive. That’s when I took my first tentative steps in making my own music and forming bands. It was when I heard Twice a Man’s „From a Northern Shore“ that I decided to make music with synths. At that time, I was already crazy about Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and so on. Of course, after that, there have been so many important influences crossing my path and I still find new ones.
Jenny: I’ve been writing “songs” since the age of five and my inspiration back then was probably some 80s hair band… I played in a lot of punk bands in my early teens, but when I first started as a solo act, I was inspired by artists like PJ Harvey. But it is hard to pinpoint a specific artist or incident.

What impact do your surroundings have on your music? You live in Stockholm. What influence does urbanity have on your artistic work? To what extent do you find inspiration in urban culture?
Fredrik: Actually, we live in different cities. Jenny lives just outside of Stockholm, and I live in Örebro, which is a smaller, maybe you can call it medium-sized, town 200 kilometers away. I wouldn’t say urban culture has a big influence on me, at least not consciously. I was raised in the woods of Småland, and I actually think nature has shaped me more than the city. If you look at our catalogue, you will also see that nature is a recurring theme. In the lyrics, but also in the music, I would say.
Jenny: Well, urbanity is actually not that big of an influence. Not anymore. I used to be drawn to big cities, traveled a lot to work and write in New York, Paris, Berlin, etc. My last solo album, “Comb out the Wicked” (2016), I wrote in Brooklyn… Nowadays, I live outside of Stockholm in a small house surrounded by forests and cow pastures. I plant roses and take long walks with my dog. Like Fredrik, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, but up north, just south of the polar circle. And I think those surroundings have influenced my writing more than any city. Pitch-dark, cold winters and midnight sun in the summers. That contrast is both dramatic and tangible.

Foto 4: © Jonas Fransson

How are your music pieces created? Where does the impulse to create something come from for you?
Fredrik: Either I come up with an idea with a beat, bass, and sometimes a synth or other instrument, and Jenny sends back an idea with chords and a vocal melody. Then we build on that. Or Jenny comes up with an idea with piano and vocals that we build on and find the arrangement. These are the two most common ways we do it.
Jenny: For me it starts with the melody, then the harmony and the beat. Those melodies can pop up at any time. My phone is filled with recordings of me humming ideas… When I think I know what kind of house we are building, I write the lyrics. Then the final arrangement usually ends up supporting the words.

Your new album A New Reign was released in November. Could you take us through the journey from the very first spark of inspiration to the finished album? What emotions or inner stories were you exploring through A New Reign?
Jenny: Well, it has been a long journey. We actually started writing songs for a new album just as we had released our last album, When the Street Calls, back in 2018. Two of the songs from back then made it to the album: ‘Primal’ and ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’. Then followed a personal tragedy when I lost both my parents in a traffic accident in the fall of 2019, and my world kind of crumbled. Then the pandemic hit, and later on Fredrik’s mom passed. The eight years it took for us to finish this album has not been easy, but I have found the writing to be, if not healing, at least comforting. The reality of these years really colored the songs, and I think made them more raw and to the point than our previous work. The songs ‘Breathing’, ‘A Part of This’, ‘Blood’, and ‘Solace’ all deal with different facets of grief, from just trying to survive to finding a glimmer of light. The title track, ‘A New Reign’, centers on a wish to hand over responsibility, to make the weight on one’s shoulders a bit lighter. When you feel like you’ve done enough and all you want is rest.

How important is the visual side of White Birches to you? How does the visual aspect relate to and reflect your music?
Jenny: It is really important, and the visuals need to be an extension of the sound. We rarely use color and try to keep it simple and graphic, both because we think it fits and because I do most of our artwork and am not skilled enough to do anything elaborate. I think it works. Our recent press pictures were taken by Ekaterina Iakiamseva, and she really captured us. This also goes for JP Bichard, who created the video for Salt the Earth; they really understood our vision as well.

How would you describe the world you are trying to create during your performances?
Fredrik: We want our live performances to reinforce what we convey with our music. There is very little talking between songs, and we work hard to be tight and keep the shows focused. If the audience leaves our show without being touched both by darkness and a sense of hope, we haven’t succeeded.

Looking ahead, what’s next for you? What are you most looking forward to?
Fredrik: First of all, I look forward to 2026 with many gigs and meetings with our audience.

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Foto 5 & 6: © Ekaterina Iakiamseva

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