The Elektronmusikstudion (also known as EMS — the studio's name pre-dates the classic British synth manufacturer by a few years!) is an electronic music studio located in Stockholm, Sweden that has been operating continuously since 1964, making it one of the world's oldest electronic music institutions that is still operating in the present day. Despite its long history, there still isn't a lot of detailed information about the EMS to be found on the English speaking internet, so we were very excited to ask some questions and learn more about this storied studio!
In the interview, EMS director Mats Lindström talks about the origin and history of EMS, how the studio has weathered the many changes the electronic music landscape has experienced over the decades and the challenge of catching up with your own history.
On your website it says that EMS began in the 1960s, inspired by the German Studio WDR. Can you say something about those origins?
Mats Lindström: In 1963, Sweden got a new music director at the Swedish Radio. And we are not like Germany [with multiple regional public radio networks]. We only had one national public service radio. And so the new director was a composer who had already worked with electronic music. And he decided immediately that he wanted to have an electronic music studio within the Swedish radio. But the director before that was also doing good lobbying work and he had been at Darmstadt [at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse] as an assistant to a Swedish pianist, where he met people like Stockhausen, and the American people [like John Cage] were also there.
So I think they were influenced by the Germans, but also the Paris studios [like Pierre Schaeffer’s GRM]. Because people from Paris, Belgium and Germany were invited to Sweden to run courses for young composers even before they built EMS. So it started with people like Gottfried Michael Koenig [read our Stromkult Interview with Kees Tazelaar from the Institute of Sonology to learn more about Koenig!], who was in Stockholm, as well as people like Iannas Xenakis. So that was the beginning of it. From the beginning, EMS was open to composers of all kinds and they were giving courses early on, also for international composers.
Were there people making electronic music in Sweden even before EMS opened?
There were some pioneers from the 50s and there were also Swedish composers already going to the WDR studio in Cologne. And I also have to mention the Warsaw Polish Radio Experimental studio, which was important and had connections to the Berlin Akademie der Künste Electro-Acoustic Studio.
And so how did it involve from being this experimental studio to being this — I guess, kind of academic — institution?
We are actually not an academic institution, even today! That is a very special institutional position for EMS. There was a “divorce” with the Swedish radio in 1970, when the EMS became an independent foundation under the Swedish government. The base of the foundation was the Royal Academy of Music, which was a very stable funding situation. And EMS stayed under that situation for 25 years, from 1970 to 1995.
Then EMS moved to a bigger foundation, the Swedish National Concert Institute. And now, we are part of a state agency — actually, the agency for cultural heritage! — and the Museum of Musical Instruments and Performing Arts. So we now also have an exhibition on the history of EMS, which is at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts in Stockholm.
Sometimes we have collaborations with academic institutions — they pay the teachers and we do the course programming. But we are not doing exams or any of the administration, we just host the courses.
EMS is one of the very few electronic music studios from the 50s and 60s that has made it into the 21st century and is still operating today. How do you think it has managed to survive and run continually for sixty years?
I think it’s that we have always been a very small institution, so we can change very quickly (laughs), and adapt to the larger environment and the needs of the composers. There was a lot of confusion in the late 90s for example, when all these supercomputer studios started to get replaced with small digital workstations. But we have managed to adapt, and I think a big part of that is just that we have very good listening environments and a lot of studios, we have six working studios and a recording room. And we are open all year, around the clock, basically. So people can meet at the coffee table; of course, it is also a social thing.
Since when have you been at EMS?
I have been here for twenty years (laughs)! I first visited EMS as a composer in the beginning of the 90s and I have been the director since 2004.
I remember when I came here twenty years ago, people discussed replacing our old analogue synthesizer systems with plugins and computers [...] But instead, I decided to renovate our old Bucha and Serge systems. In retrospect, that was the right decision.
How did you experience the transition to digital at the time? I get the impression that many people thought that an electronic music studio like EMS would be obsolete once everyone can just make music on their laptop.
I remember when I came here twenty years ago, people discussed replacing our old analogue synthesizer systems with plugins and computers — “it’s much better, you have more control etc.” (laughs)! But instead, I decided to renovate our old Bucha and Serge systems. In retrospect, that was the right decision.
For sure!
They are really attractive to people now — when they come to work here, they also want to collect some sounds from stuff they can’t find anywhere else. I was visiting the GRM in Paris just a couple weeks ago and they are now building hardware clones of their old custom-built instruments from the 1950s and 1960s. I think that’s the right strategy.
But also, what you can’t easily do in your bedroom is to listen at whatever volume you want with very high quality sound. We have really good speaker systems in all studios and we have two studios that let you work with different standards, so there’s a circle with ten speakers and there’s five speakers in the roof, which makes it possible to work with Ambisonics, Dolby, different formats for film sound, and so on.
We’ve also tried to make it easier to connect the studios with your own equipment. But that’s also a challenge. There are all these new systems and standards, but we don’t have an infinite supply of money and can’t just throw out all of our old interfaces and computers and replace them with the newest stuff — we have to have a plan. Inflation has struck us quite hard, everything is going up in price, without any possible negotiation (laughs).
So you value both the modern digital and the old analogue side when it comes to the studio?
Definitely, it’s such a nice era now, where you can control old CV-based synths with your laptop just by plugging a cable into the interface. And it really works! We’ve found that very interesting.
What is the process of getting access to the EMS studios like?
If you attend one of our courses, you can apply for a work project. If you are a professional composer and have the knowledge to work independently, you can apply to become an EMS composer — although you should work on non-commercial productions, “strange sounds” basically, as normal people refer to it (laughs). We also have an international residency program that has one application process per year. But we were really struck by Covid in that respect, because we had 150 applicants that were approved and then couldn’t come. So we had to cancel all the new open calls for a year and half. But now, we are planning to do another open call this year. We’ll probably get about 100 applicants, but can only approve forty of them in order to not get too much pressure on the studio use.
And once you get approved, how long do international people usually stay at the studio?
Performing arts people usually have time to stay for ten days or something like that. We have tried to do longer residencies, but musicians might be married to another musician; they have kids, they can’t just be away for a month. Fine arts scholarships can be much longer, up to three months and longer, and they have funding so they can offer opportunities for people to bring their families. We can’t support that kind of funding and mobility at the moment. But we do help with recommendation letters and many people succeed with getting grant money from somewhere.
Once we approve someone, it can take up to nine months until they actually come, so there’s a lot of ongoing work with coordinating all of that. We have an international coordinator who specifically works on that.
Some fairly well known artists have worked at the EMS studios, like Caterina Barbieri for example.
Caterina lived here for a while, she was studying at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, which also gives you access to EMS. I think it’s important for students to be able to build a relationship with EMS even while they are studying. You should catch them before they get destroyed by the conservatories (laughs)! Some people do come back to visit EMS every now and then, like Caterina.
I think it’s nice to have a mixture of new people and these more long-term relationships. So you can have someone who is an international celebrity just run into someone who doesn’t even know who they are (laughs), you can have a famous composer sitting here and talking to someone who is totally fresh.
I saw on your website that you also have young composers working as interns at EMS via the European Erasmus program?
Since we are not an academic institution, we can’t do regular Erasmus, but we can have Erasmus+ where people can get time off to do an internship. So we have a young woman from France coming from September, someone from Poland, and actually one of Keez Tazelaar (Institute of Sonology) students is coming early next year.
Does it inspire you to work with these young and upcoming composers?
Absolutely. We don’t have any opinion on what people should do. Some people ask, “what do you expect me to do?” and we just say, “you should continue to be yourself!” (laughs). So people can just ask “is it possible to do this?”, and then we can figure out if that’s possible. I do sometimes get surprised by what people will do.
Can you talk about the courses you are running?
We have different courses. For example, right now we are doing a course on how to integrate SuperCollider with the Serge synthesizer, that’s a course for professionals. But every season, in autumn and spring, we are also running an introductory course. Then we have the basic course that teaches people how to use the studios. And you don’t have to have any knowledge of music beforehand. The introduction course is more theoretical, and the basic course is more practical. These courses are in Swedish and can last up to ten weeks with the basic course, so it’s mostly local people.
We tend to have about fifteen people in the introduction course and then we follow up with eight people for the basic courses. We get a lot of requests for the courses, so we have tried to double up the courses, but it became a conflict with the professionals and guest composers in terms of the usage of the studio facilities. So we are limiting ourselves to one course at a time for now.
What kind of people usually participate in these courses?
It's quite difficult to be a teacher for these courses! Because it could be that one person has been a sound technician for the Swedish radio for ten years and then another person is totally new! There’s a lot of variation with the background knowledge of the participants. But you really don’t have to have any prior training, you just have to have a dedicated interest.
We want to support the careers of potential professional composers, but of course that is quite tough. Many people take the courses, they get work here and there, and then it [the music thing] eventually fades out for them. You might randomly meet them much later and they realize they haven’t visited the studio in fifteen years (laughs). But we actually have had people that have been away for that long and then returned after their kids have grown up!
What do you think is the purpose of a studio like EMS today?
I think it serves an important part in the professional composers’ infrastructure. It is essential, as it is the only place where you can play loud, you can play quiet, and you can have good monitoring and really know what you are doing. In order to do a professional job, you need these kinds of facilities. But of course, you also have to recruit new people all the time. Because many successful international composers have started their career at EMS!
Are you also running one-off or special workshops?
Yes! For example, we are going to have a workshop on microscopic recording soon. We do these kinds of shorter workshops, also for things like field recording and software integration with classic synthesizers.
What are currently working on with respect to the studio infrastructure?
We need to do a new network connection between the studios, with ethernet signal distribution between the studios. I think that’s a step we need to take. The Dante system is what we will choose I suppose, and we will change the interfaces to Dante compatible interfaces.
I think we have found a good balance with the professional studio use and the educational courses. What we would like to do more is to use the international guest composers more for presentations and workshops while they are here. But at the moment, we don’t have resources for that. Although sometimes, someone just offers to do it, like Tuesday at 1pm in the conference room, which could be very exclusive and useful! (laughs)
You’ve said you’ve been at EMS for 20 years now. What keeps you still going and excited?
I have to say, my job has changed a lot over the years. It’s always fun, because you are always meeting new people. Like, if I go to Berlin to the CTM festival or something, I will meet so many people I recognize, and they will talk to me like they know me very well (laughs). Often, I can’t remember when they were at EMS, although I can always guess I must have met them through EMS. I always try to figure out how many composers I have met over the years — it has to be well over a thousand for the twenty years I’ve been here!
You mentioned visiting the CTM Festival — do you try to stay involved in the international electro-acoustic and experimental electronic scene?
We try to! I don’t know if it’s a Swedish specialty, but we are engaged with a festival called Norberg Festival, which is a mix of electro-acoustic music, academic institutions and the club scene. And I heard from international guests, that this is not so internationally common, this kind of mixture.
On a personal level, I think that the academic world on its own doesn’t really offer so much value. Sometimes people who are involved with it are doing nice stuff, but it’s not something that leads to anything interesting just purely by itself. And the “traditional” electro-acoustic scene has very much survived in the academic institutions. They are still running these festivals and doing academic exchanges and competitions, but to me it seems like quite a closed world.
But of course, loads of academic research also leads to interesting inventions. If you buy some kind of DJ software that has all these effects, many of these effects probably stem from research that was done in the electronic-acoustic studios of the 1950s and 1960s, and they are totally available for anyone now, you may even have them as free software on your computer!
Speaking of these old techniques, I think we will do a staff course for maintaining vintage tape machines. We have had this idea to do reel flanging and things like that. But first we need to renovate our old Studer tape machines, we have just renovated two of them. When that’s done, I think we should do a course — we still have some old quarter inch tape to give out to people who want to do experiments! (laughs)
You’ve said your job has changed a lot over the years. How have those changes manifested themselves?
When I came here, we had pretty much no international composers and it was basically 99% men, maybe one woman here and there. That was the users of EMS at the time. So we have managed to change a lot, in terms of who is working here. It’s changing so much all the time, even just on a weekly basis. We always have the current guest composers on our website, and it can be exciting even just to see who is working on Monday, for example! (laughs) But it really is a constant struggle, we went through some political crises during my years and also before me. Every five or eight years there is a crisis, I guess we will soon have our next one!
What is your own background — how did you get involved with electronic music?
I didn’t study composition, I studied electrical engineering. I was a test engineer in the industry and then I started to build electronic instruments myself. I eventually dropped out of that industry and started to work as a composer and producer. I still actively produce and make music. I have an LP on Ideologic Organ, for example.
What’s coming up for EMS in the near future?
We are planning a release now — a box set of music recorded at EMS with as much as 8 CDs to coincide with the EMS 60th anniversary. We are trying to fit in as much as possible, to represent the last thirty years at least. We might also put in some really vintage pieces that have never been heard publicly. There’s still so much that hasn’t been heard yet from people that have worked here, and we unfortunately don’t have the staff resources to take care of everything in the archives. But we have plans to catch up with our tradition. As we are part of a cultural heritage state agency, we are trying to find a collaboration to help us with registering everything that is here in the archives — and in such a case, we will have a connection with the Royal Library of Sweden, which would then have a public database. There’s always rights issues, so not everyone might be able to listen, but I hope this will all be solved in the next ten years at least! (laughs)
We have a big tape archive, and there’s still ongoing work to digitize them. The one inch tapes are done now, but with the quarter inch tapes we still have three or four years of work ahead of us until the backlog is done.
I find it fascinating that there’s all this incredible material that has been just sitting in the archives and is just now being rediscovered — like with the recent release of the NID Tapes [read the Stromkult feature about the NID Tapes here!] from India’s first electronic music studio.
Actually, just before this interview, I had a call with Paul Purgas [who is behind the NID reissue project]! We are doing a presentation about this Telex project that was done between New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad and Tokyo back in 1971! They were trying to do some kind of art project with telex machines, connecting different institutions.
Is there any artist from the EMS archives that you think is particularly interesting that most people haven’t heard of?
Yes, an artist called Roberta Settels. We have now released a double LP reissue of her work. Most of the stuff is from the late 70s and early 80s. She’s fairly unknown even today. She died in 2014. Settels was originally American and lived and worked in Paris for a time and later became a Swedish citizen and worked at the EMS. She was politically banned as a composer because she was going to release an LP on a Swedish state-funded record label and she named the release “Meinhof in Memoriam” [referring to Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction]. And this was shortly after an incident in Stockholm in 1975 when the Red Army Faction occupied and took hostages at the West German Embassy in Stockholm. So it was super sensitive at the time!
You can find out more about EMS Stockholm and and contact them over at their official website elektronmusikstudion.se!