"Marta Arpini is truly a gem, one of those precious ones, because with her small orchestra, for which she personally took care of the arrangement parts, she managed to do amazing things that one could rarely expect to come out of our songwriting, and she made it pass like a cakewalk."
Gabriele Vollaro, Rockit.it
"Marta Arpini is the contemporary
storyteller we were waiting for."
Futura1993
"With her daring melodies and colorful orchestrations, Marta Arpini is in a class of her own among singer-songwriters." Bimhuis
Marta's star is rising thanks to an original mix of indie, folk, chamber pop and alt jazz.
Her songs surprise you time and time again because of the lyrical and musical angles; sometimes playful, sometimes sweet and fragile, but always seductive.
Marta Arpini is a singer, songwriter and composer from Crema (Italy), currently living in Amsterdam (NL).
Born in 1994, Marta started studying music as a child, with private piano lessons; she started studying singing at the age of 12.
From 2014 to 2017 she studied jazz vocals at Civici Corsi di Jazz in Milano, where she graduated with the highest grade. At the same time she studied Modern Literature at Università Statale degli Studi di Milano. In January 2016 she won the Audience Award in the national competition “Chicco Bettinardi” for young Italian jazz talents.
Marta specialized in jazz vocals with a master program at Conservatorium van Amsterdam (2017-2019).
Marta's debut album "Forest Light" (2019, Challenge Records International) was nominated to the prestigious the Edison Jazz/World Award 2020, the "Dutch Grammy". Her quintet won the Keep an Eye the Records in November 2020.
Her sophomore album, "I Am a Gem" (2022, Dox Records), marks the start of a new chapter. Combining her diverse inspirations, Marta is exploring new sounds and orchestrations, diving deeper into her love for songwriting and into the alternative pop and folk universes. By adding instruments to the usual and original line-up, her semi-acoustic quintet, Marta created her pocket orchestra, a 10 elements band with a peculiar horn section and more singers.
In 2021 Marta released her EP "Songs From a Garden", recorded together with Portuguese guitar player Gonçalo Neto.
Marta is also the songwriter and front-woman of the indie rock band tiigre, that released their first EP, "Hot Dreams", in April 2022.
Marta also actively collaborates with different bands and creatives, both in the Netherlands and in Italy, such as Fuensanta, Radio Trapani, Laura Polence, Molino, Floris Kappeyne's Echo, Alistair Payne, I Am a Fish and more. In November 2021 she toured with Louis Cole & Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands as backing vocalist.
At age twenty two, Marta moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to attend Conservatorium van Amsterdam and finish her academic career in jazz.
The urge to focus on songwriting, and develop her own sound and signature as a singer-songwriter, has been brewing for the past five years, and has followed a persistent direction; the consequential turn her musical path has been taking feels both like a return to the roots and a push forward.
The step forward is informed by years of musical practice and training within the jazz world, but takes her closer to her true-er self as an artist, where intimate, diaristic songwriting and storytelling intertwine with a peculiar taste for layered arrangements and production – dreamy, enchanted, with hazy melancholy and a constant spark of hopefulness at the same time.
“Those who love indie, experimentation and catchy sounds will not be disappointed by this singer-songwriter”, wrote ELLE Magazine Italia, referring to Marta’s album “I Am a Gem” (Dox Records, 2022). “She’s a teenager, a kid and a woman at the same time”.
Marta’s songs simultaneously carry innocence – a sort of candor, a joie de vivre – and a profound sense of self, a propensity to in depth introspection and expression of a wide spectrum of emotions, from the brightest, lightest ones to confronting and mysterious feelings. Marta taps into the heterogeneous sources of inspirations and memories that are the foundation of her musical sensitivity: from folk to rock, Elliott Smith, the Beatles, Andy Shauf, Jon Brion, Adrianne Lenker, Chris Weisman, Tōth, Wilco… Marta’s determined journey into the indie universe is equipped with a predilection for surprising harmonic turns, unconventional forms and a love for tender sounds, tape-y timbres, soft, crystal clear vocals, dusty guitars, misty horns and occasional grand openings and intense passages.
The complexity of Marta’s songs never gets in the way, but enhances the beauty of how easy it is to listen to them, while getting carried away in a whole new world of its own.