Martina Bertoni

Martina Bertoni is a classically trained composer and cellist with a strong bent for experimentation.

She started playing her instrument at a very young age, and after her years of training, her inclination toward sonic research led her over the years to take an interest in, and produce, soundtracks for films and TV series, as well as to collaborate repeatedly with Teho Teardo, organically within the Modern Institute project and contributing to the first shared chapter with Blixa Bargeld.

Central to her sonic practice is the investigation of the sensory possibilities activated by the cello's frequencies, both in the form of acoustic vibrations and abstract modulations obtained through careful filtering and manipulation work. Starting in 2018, following this direction, she began charting her own solo path, releasing two short works and arriving in 2020 at a remarkable debut album for the Icelandic label Falk.

All The Ghosts Are Gone, well received by critics, immediately made clear her vocation for defining atmospheric landscapes built on a balanced dialogue between experimentation and harmonic research, along with her interest in exploring the shifting connections between sound and the dreamlike dimension.

Along the same lines is the following Music For Empty Flats (2021, Karlrecords), an album that draws its lifeblood from a series of emotional inputs stemming from an almost unbelievable experience lived through during a leaden, solitary Reykjavík winter. In it, the Berlin-based musician sketches an unsettling, estranging universe built on expanding the contamination of heterogeneous musical vocabularies, carried out with technical mastery and vivid sensitivity.

Hypnagogia (2023, Karlrecords) pushes the sound material more decisively toward the transfiguration of its sources, marking a reduction in the presence of the cello's pure voice—a choice that nonetheless doesn't diminish the vividly imaginative quality of her music.

In 2025, again on Karlrecords, she releases Electroacoustic Works For Halldorophone, an album created during an artistic residency

at Stockholm's Elektronmusikstudion using the halldorophone, a sort of electroacoustic cello created by designer Halldór Úlfarsson that exploits the possibilities of positive feedback. In her skilled hands, the instrument becomes a generator of atmospheric journeys that connect composition and chance in minimalist-leaning sequences, showing just how well Bertoni can combine experimentation with narrative depth.

(Peppe Trotta)