Through circumstance and by choice, Ulrika Mild is perhaps one of the best kept secrets in Swedish electronic pop…
Under her alias of COMPUTE, Ulrika Mild says “I’m just a girl standing in front of a machine asking it to go ‘bleep bloop’…” with her first EP of DIY synth ‘Dance With Me’ released in 2004. In parallel, she was part of indiepop trio LIECHTENSTEIN while longer form releases ‘This’ and ‘The Distance’ beamed forth in 2009 and 2012 respectively.
2012 also saw the release of ‘Friends Of Electronically Yours Present The Seventies Revisited’, a charity synth covers collection on which COMPUTE contributed a sprightly version of ‘Goodbye’, a song written by Paul McCartney for Mary Hopkin while in 2014, there was punk themed follow-up ‘Anarchy In The EY – Electronically Up Yours’ which included a COMPUTE cover of ‘Hong Kong Garden’.
But COMPUTE went into hiatus with Mild only emerging in 2016 as part of THE VOLT on a one-off single with Eddie Bengtsson of PAGE and SISTA MANNEN PÅ JORDEN fame. Then there were a few other collaborations including (mostly) electronic supergoup AMUSI with 2022’s dark and trippy ‘EP-A’. But in 2023 came ‘the proper dimensions of a load bearing structure’, the first COMPUTE album for 11 years.
Photo by Allan Bank
Back with her most ambitious body of work yet, COMPUTE issues ‘NKI’ with lyrics in Swedish steadily pointing downward in its social criticism and honesty. It’s a summer protest record expressing her dismay at the world around her. ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK chatted to Ulrika Mild about her music over the years and much more…
Your new EP ‘NKI’ follows 2023’s ‘the proper dimensions of a load bearing structure’ which was your first COMPUTE release since the album ‘The Distance’ in 2012, although there were collaborations with Eddie Bengtsson as THE VOLT in 2016 and Deadbeat in 2017, why has there been such a long gap in releases?
Well… sometimes life takes unexpected and cruel turns. My husband got sick when our kid turned one, and for some years all I had time and energy for was work to keep us afloat, searching for, contacting, and keeping track of all different kinds of medical treatments that we hoped would help, and taking care of our daughter. I guess that sums up the title ‘the proper dimensions of a load bearing structure’. Like, how much can you carry and still be functional? Happy? Ok to be around? After some years I started finding time now and then during the night to make music. My studio was gone by then, but you can do quite a lot with only your phone and laptop it turns out!
How do you look back now on ‘The Distance’, your debut album ‘This’ and those early EPs ‘Dance With Me’ and ‘Computopia’?
Some of it holds up, some of it I can’t listen to without feeling like when you read your teenage diaries and feel amazed you ever had any friends!
What inspired ‘the proper dimensions of a load bearing structure’ (‘tpdoalbs’) and in what ways had you changed creatively?
Those are a collection of songs made over quite a few years. I said during one of my live shows a while ago that one could create a timelime and pinpoint the exact year I stopped writing about love and started writing about death… and I guess that album is that point. It’s about uncertainty, fear, how your reality remains the same, but you no longer feel like a part of it. And so on. A proper bundle of joy!
Musically it’s different as well. On ‘The Distance’ I put a lot of focus on vocal layering, but on ‘tpdoalbs’ I wanted to push myself into more restraint than before. To dare and let the music go on for longer without vocals, skip the typical chorus, or let it wait for almost two thirds of the song before introducing it… stuff like that. And more pads!
‘On My Own’ has this lovely lilting KRAFTWERK quality about it, were they an inspiration in your music? Who else were you inspired by?
Of course, if you want to listen to restraint that still manages to convey emotions and groove, you can’t ignore KRAFTWERK. However, it was actually Robyn that was my major influence for that particular song. But I draw inspiration from so many places. Just snippets of ideas that I want to try and ”computify”. Like – ‘Bulletproof’ by LA ROUX – where does the energy come from? It’s not the drums driving it forward, there’s something else. Or ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ by Kylie, how can she go on in the same layered backing vocals all throughout, but still convey emotions? Or ‘Edamame’ by bbno$ and Rich Brian – exchanging the bass drum for a hard driving bass, how can I do that without losing to much of the beat? And so on.
Of course the music landscape has changed considerably now with streaming, how have you adapted and are platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp making things much easier than before?
Let’s just be clear. I suck at PR. I sucked before streaming and Bandcamp and all that, and I still suck. I’ve come to terms with it. I should get help. But I suck at that too. That being said – it’s of course a lot easier to make your music available to more people now. But it’s still hard for me to motivate anyone to listen to my stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to draw a bigger audience, but the Swedish concept of ”jante” runs deep in me. There is so much music out there, so much talent, so many voices. That anyone finds me in all of that, gives my music their time – and actually likes it? Mindblowing. It fills me with so much joy whenever I get a shoutout. Maybe that is the beauty of the ever expanding buzz of new music, every true interaction is worth so much more, since you’re up against the world, competing for everyone’s time and interest?
How do you find using social media, you don’t appear totally at ease with it? 😉
Haha, no-one should be. No, I’m actually fine with it. I’ve met a lot of great people through it that I would never have met otherwise, been given opportunities to collaborate, like with Eddie in THE VOLT, or the guys in AMUSI. At the same time, it can be a totally rotten place, bringing out the absolute worst in people and amplifying it to extremes. I try to create my own space. I follow pages about art, moss, manhole covers, old bridges, Star Trek and archaeology. It makes for a soothing background while I keep up with people I actually want to keep up with.
‘NKI’ is sung in Swedish… had it become too much work to continue writing lyrics in English? Does performing in Swedish feel more natural to you?
I kind of found it harder to write in Swedish… I think that it being my own language made me more thoughtful of how I actually use it. It hits harder for me. But I think this is a one-off, I already have an English album almost done. But we’ll see. I definitely enjoyed doing it!
There appears to be a darker if still melodic presence on ‘NKI’ like on the opening song ‘Närmare’, how do feel about the state of the world right now?
The world is… well, where do I even start. We have these huge huge problems that threaten our whole existence, and we just continue trying to bury our heads in the sand, voting for those who present us with the easiest solution even though everyone by now surely must see that it’ll only get us into more trouble? But that’s the legacy we leave for our kids to deal with. Blame the poor, build higher walls, change nothing. Pathetic!
‘Ett lock, en grop, en vägg, ett slut’ is what I would call “classic” COMPUTE in that it is almost like a development of ‘Dawning Days’ from ‘The Distance’?
Yeah, well that’s an older song, actually the song that triggered me to make ‘NKI’. I’ve had it up on Soundcloud for many years, and had somewhere along the line lost the original recording. But I know it’s a fan favourite, so I’ve done it live a couple of times. And then this guy commented on it on Soundcloud, saying he needed it on Spotify so he could add it to a playlist. And instead of just releasing that one song, knowing the amount of work it would take to get a releasable file, the original being lost and all, I thought that I should make it into an EP. So to answer your question, it’s not at all surprising that you find similarities, it has a lot of the vocal layering from ‘The distance’, and at the same time it resembles some of the use of pads from ”tpdoalbs”, so maybe it’s the missing piece between those two records?
‘Sten & Glashus’ has this fantastic melancholic drive about it, what is it about and what tools do you like to work with to construct your productions?
‘Sten & Glashus’ is a song I originally sang with a band called KONTRABAND, so it’s really sort of a cover; it’s written by their frontman Peter Hageus, so I can only tell you my interpretation of it, but it’s this beautifully told story of just keeping your head down, pushing through, not having it in you to take on anything more than what’s already on your plate.
Making it through life when life really doesn’t deliver on what was promised. Everything except the vocals on that one is made with FL Studio Mobile. This is why I’ll never be proper ”synth” I guess. I care very little about what tools I use, I only want to make my songs, as true to my vision as possible. But then again, Dave Gahan said the same thing in an interview once, so maybe there’s hope for me yet?
There’s the surprise of guitar on ‘Faller vi’ that is quite countrified, how did this happen?
Again, I just want to make my songs, giving them the best presentation I can muster. Sometimes that means doing it all on my phone, in this case it required slide guitar from before mentioned Peter Hageus. I just wanted to add a new element of like emptiness… it’s a song that takes place during Fall, in the smell of damp dead leaves. I wanted something organic that felt like faint bursts of wind in those dead leaves. And he really delivered on that request!
You’ve shown yourself to be adept at cover versions, with songs as different as ‘Förlåt’ by PAGE, ‘Hong Kong Garden’ by Siouxsie and ‘Goodbye’ by Mary Hopkin, how do you choose what ones you will interpret?
I typically try to avoid doing covers close to my own genre, ‘Förlåt’ being the exception. Both ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Hong Kong Garden’ were picked for me, which made them even more challenging to find my own take on, but ‘Goodbye’ in particular I fell quite in love with. I listen to a lot of music from all kinds of genres, so when it comes to my own choices, I just pick the ones that I love and believe I can do something different with.
So far I’ve done songs by artists like Björk, VIOLENT FEMMES, THE CURE and Miley Cyrus along with Swedish heroes of mine like BRAINPOOL, WANNADIES, POPSICLE, KENT and others. I mostly do them as treats for my live shows, but with those you’ve mentioned, they’ve found their way to compilations as well. I often aim to try to keep the structure close to the original, but once that is built, I stop listening to the original until I’m finished. By then I often realise I’ve forgotten certain parts, or thrown the lyrics around, but I think that shows how my brain interpreted the song, so all mistakes stay.
Photo by Anders Nord
THE VOLT was a project with Eddie Bengtsson to do nuclear Armageddon themed covers that just lasted one single; ‘Thirteen Men’ was originally a bluesy tune ‘Thirteen Women & One Man’ written and performed by Dickie Thompson, so how did you both approach a synthesized version from a female perspective?
We actually have more music hidden in our safe… we’ll see if we pick up that thread again. I really enjoyed this project, it gave me an opportunity to sing in a different way than normally, adding that Cold War swag to it, and again, trying to make the rigidness that can be electronic music go full on organic. Plus it was a collaboration where Eddie made the music when I sang, and I made the music when he sang. It was wild producing, we both have strong opinions and are used to being in total control of our craft so to speak. But the result was really something!
Eddie Bengtsson hates the term “synthpop” and coined “indietronica” for DIY pop music using synths, how would you like your music to be described to help with algorithms and getting your work heard?
I don’t want to help the algorithms… but yeah, I think Eddie’s right on this one, I very much make indietronica. I come from the indie scene, I like the grittier, not so polished sound, I don’t care much for perfection, I just crave the intended feeling to be conveyed. I tried to describe it like this: “shoes full of indie, a capful of synthpop, a mitten full of annoyance and a heart rate that never goes below 120 BPM. I burn the bad and the good as best I can, boil it down to sugar syrup and mix it in a drink together with blip-blops and melancholy and call that drink COMPUTE”; but my guess is the algorithms lose focus somewhere around ”mittens” and move on to someone mentioning seeing their microwave just hit 2:42!
For those who are new to COMPUTE, what 3 songs would you select as starters for them to check out?
I would probably go with ’Dawning Days’, ‘On My Own’ and ‘Närmare’. Maybe starting with ‘On My Own’. I think those three songs paint a pretty good picture of what I do, and I actually really like all of them. And they all lack that proper pop-song construction, so if you make it through those, you know what not to expect. Then I would maybe play ‘All Walk By’ and finish up with ‘Dance With Me’, just to prove I actually know what a chorus is!
What is next for you, either as COMPUTE or in collaboration?
Like I mentioned, I actually have an album ready, waiting for mastering right now. I decided to bring in some help and outside views in the mixing process this time, we’ll see when we feel ready for that reveal. But it’s back to English, with a theme of failure and loss. So fun for everyone!
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Ulrika Mild
‘NKI’ is available digitally from https://computopia.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/computopia
https://www.instagram.com/compvtopia
https://soundcloud.com/compute
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3mhqnK87sBw1nzHLuvOTQo
Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
20th August 2025
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