While synthesizers, vinyl records, photographs, and other media are also developing digitization and its technology, there is also a trend toward a return to analog in some areas. How do you see this trend?We could discuss consumer trends such as Polaroids, vinyl records, or modular synthesizers, or even whether their digital simulations imitate them well enough, but I think the question can be addressed on a different level. I rather like the position of Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester
Interacting with a physical instrument is a complex process, and we fool ourselves if we think that can be reduced to measuring physical gestures or recording sound output. And even if we could someday plant electrodes in the performer’s brain and capture every part of the rich thought process involved in an improvisation, for example, would measuring and simulating it make life better for anyone? It might make business more profitable for extractive capitalist entities like Spotify, who desperately try to avoid paying artists anything close to what they deserve for their creative labor. Artificially “intelligent” musicians will never go on strike, and will deliver as long as the electricity bill is paid. In short: if digitization aids extractive capitalism, then perhaps there are certain things we should protect from digitization —at least until our ethics someday catch up with our technology. And that is a situation which I have my doubts about. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should do something.
This may well sound like a contradiction of my earlier statement, that perhaps all techno music was actually already written by the Roland electronic music corporation. Again, that only holds true if you remain fixated on the output. Recalling the users of the Benjolins I built, I think of them as participating in sound in a way which goes beyond simply hearing, spectating, or consuming a finished product. Their use of the instrument crosses over into interacting with the sound possibilities which the object provides in a meaningful way without concern of whether the output is art, music, product, or something else entirely. Perhaps at the best moments, the user of the instrument even loses any sense of self or ego whatsoever.
Earlier I asked you about your self-study, but you are currently enrolled in a PhD program in Media & Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Could you tell us about your motivation and how you came to pursue education in the field of expertise?The story of how I arrived in Sweden is quite simple really. At the start of 2020, I saw the my opportunities as a traveling performer and teacher dry up almost instantaneously. I assumed that my instrument building work would dry up as well, and that everyone would be sitting tight on any money that they had until the pandemic was over. However, what actually happened was that everyone sat around bored at home and ordered things on the internet, and suddenly I was buried in orders! However, I was starting to get restless with sitting alone all day soldering circuits and drilling holes in wooden boxes. Really, like everyone else in the world, I needed more stimulation and more human contact.
My future supervisor at the Royal Institute of Technology had just published a job call, looking for someone to research a collection of sound instruments used in the history of electronic and electro-acoustic music in Sweden during the 1960s and 70s. No less than five of my friends forwarded this posting to me, and every one of them told me: “Hey look! They invented a job for you in Sweden, why don’t you just go and take it?”. It’s true that I already had a bit of a relationship with Sweden, and in particular with Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS, who is a partner in this project. So the fit seemed natural.
I’m still getting used to having what is essentially an office job, however! And the demands on my time and in particular on my mental attention have really taught me a great deal about care of the self. I contrast the office setting with plenty of trips to the museum archive to investigate old instruments. In particular, I am looking at one called the Andromatic, which was designed by Erkki Kurenniemi in 1968 for the Swedish composer Ralph Lundsten. It was imagined as a very futuristic instrument, built in a transparent plexiglass case so you can see the electronics inside, and had a plugin to control a series of lights in an installation. Kurenniemi told Ralph he was making an automatic pop music machine, which of course isn’t too far from what people expect from so-called AI tools nowadays!
Andromatic Sequence
The Andromatic is a highly idiosyncratic, ten step pattern sequencer and synthesizer built by Erkki Kurenniemi for composer Ralph Lundsten in 1968. It creates musical patterns through a combination of counters and shift registers which pass single bits through the steps. This video shows a sequence consisting of two counter lines interrupted by a shift register. The pin matrix on the right hand side routes the outputs of each step through a variety of low, band, and high pass filters.
Video shot by Derek Holzer at Scenkonstmuseets föremålsarkiv, Stockholm, May 2022.
The Andromatic is a highly idiosyncratic, ten step pattern sequencer and synthesizer built by Erkki Kurenniemi for composer Ralph Lundsten in 1968. It creates musical patterns through a combination of counters and shift registers which pass single bits through the steps. This video shows a sequence consisting of two counter lines interrupted by a shift register. The pin matrix on the right hand side routes the outputs of each step through a variety of low, band, and high pass filters.
Video shot by Derek Holzer at Scenkonstmuseets föremålsarkiv, Stockholm, May 2022.
Erkki Kurenniemi’s Andromatic demonstrated by Jari Suominen
The Andromatic is a highly idiosyncratic, ten step pattern sequencer and synthesizer built by Erkki Kurenniemi for composer Ralph Lundsten in 1968. Only one of its kind was ever built, and it is currently held in the archives of the Swedish Performing Arts Museum outside Stockholm.
In this video, Kurenniemi expert Jari Suominen demonstrates the various actions of the Andromatic sequencer.
The Andromatic was used in audiovisual art installations by Lundsten and fellow composer Leo Nilsson in the late 1960’s. It was also a central instrument in Lundsten’s Andromeda studio until its closure in 2014. Ralph has described the instrument as one of his favorites, and likely used it on a very regular basis. Sounds from the Andromatic appear on many recorded works in Lundsten’s vast catalog. This unique instrument forms an incredibly valuable part of Sweden’s musical heritage, which deserves to be both preserved and made accessible.
The Andromatic contains ten individual steps, each of which has a knob controlling its duration, pitch, and amplitude. The large toggle switches on the bottom of each step determine what happens to that step on every clock pulse. The instrument is fully polyphonic, meaning that all ten steps can be heard at once if active. In COUNT mode, a step is toggled on and off by the previous step (and therefor changes state at half the speed of the previous step). In SHIFT mode, a step takes the state of the previous step on every clock pulse, creating a data shift register which passes a pattern of bits through the adjacent steps. In BREAK mode, the stage is held on. This mode is also necessary to start a SHIFT sequence on the following steps. The ten stages are routed to a variety of low, band, and high pass filters with a 10x10 pin matrix. The Andromatic also has a break out cable to control external lighting with the state of each sequencer step.
I would like to thank Jari, the Swedish Performing Arts Museum, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Research Council for their support of my research on the Andromatic.
The Andromatic is a highly idiosyncratic, ten step pattern sequencer and synthesizer built by Erkki Kurenniemi for composer Ralph Lundsten in 1968. Only one of its kind was ever built, and it is currently held in the archives of the Swedish Performing Arts Museum outside Stockholm.
In this video, Kurenniemi expert Jari Suominen demonstrates the various actions of the Andromatic sequencer.
The Andromatic was used in audiovisual art installations by Lundsten and fellow composer Leo Nilsson in the late 1960’s. It was also a central instrument in Lundsten’s Andromeda studio until its closure in 2014. Ralph has described the instrument as one of his favorites, and likely used it on a very regular basis. Sounds from the Andromatic appear on many recorded works in Lundsten’s vast catalog. This unique instrument forms an incredibly valuable part of Sweden’s musical heritage, which deserves to be both preserved and made accessible.
The Andromatic contains ten individual steps, each of which has a knob controlling its duration, pitch, and amplitude. The large toggle switches on the bottom of each step determine what happens to that step on every clock pulse. The instrument is fully polyphonic, meaning that all ten steps can be heard at once if active. In COUNT mode, a step is toggled on and off by the previous step (and therefor changes state at half the speed of the previous step). In SHIFT mode, a step takes the state of the previous step on every clock pulse, creating a data shift register which passes a pattern of bits through the adjacent steps. In BREAK mode, the stage is held on. This mode is also necessary to start a SHIFT sequence on the following steps. The ten stages are routed to a variety of low, band, and high pass filters with a 10x10 pin matrix. The Andromatic also has a break out cable to control external lighting with the state of each sequencer step.
I would like to thank Jari, the Swedish Performing Arts Museum, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Research Council for their support of my research on the Andromatic.