Preface Around 2015, after a series of layoffs justified by economic reasons, I started to carry out a few artistic projects and make a bit more music again. Since things were already shitty, I told myself I might as well try and take control of my semi-precarious situation. Between 2018 and 2020, I obtained three public grants with the aim of setting up a series of work residencies; the hope was to approach several various pioneering studios in the field of electronic music and improvise on their audio equipment and first-generation analogue modular synthesisers. In the end, I was able to work at EMS – Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, Radio Belgrade and KSYME in Athens in 2019, Willem Twee in Den Bosch in the Netherlands in 2020 and, later, at Columbia University’s Computer Music Center in New York in 2023. A lot of content on this website will be related to State Music. Outside this LP, there’s many other outputs like multichannel concerts, texts, interviews and exhibitions.

Playing iconic instruments was interesting, but I didn’t want to fetishize these machines. Plus, back in 2018, I realised that my music alone wouldn’t be enough to convince cultural institutions to fund this first solo album. I needed to propose something extra, an approach, something along the lines of research, for example. I’ve always found my interest in electroacoustic and concrete music a bit suspicious. Where did this attraction to instruments and sonorities from the pioneer era of the early 1950s come from? Even before seriously getting into the practice of electronic music, I was wary of it. I could feel I was caught up in a romanticised vision of this era, exacerbated by the black and white images of these iconic studios and machines – images which were on record covers from this period, in the books I read, and all over the internet. I told myself there must be a fundamental difference between the emergence of music driven by social demands, spiritual concerns or emancipatory discourses, and this. Intuitively, it seemed to me that the answer might lie in the relationship to the means of production. Who owned the instruments? Who made them? Who could work in these studios at the time, and would I be able to do so today?

I wanted to widen my perspective and get a better understanding of the history of the sounds I was beginning to create. My questions were numerous: What were the power relations between electronic music studios and radio institutions? What types of governments and political regimes had financed – or not financed – the development of this music? What should we understand about the links between military industries and audio technologies? What was each state’s role in the development of this music? These stories have already been well documented but I’m trying to connect them here in a personal way. Through this text and project, I seek to engage with research, writing and inquiry around these issues, outside of academic circles. Most of my sources here are secondary and there is no clearly defined research method, just a curiosity for those actively critiquing creative electronic institutions. And above all, I’m doing this for myself – to question my own music (not that of others) and to speculate through this critical questioning.