8 Dec 2009

Art's Birthday 2010

As usual, we will be celebrating Art's Birthday also in 2010. Location: Södra Teatern. The event will be broadcast. Artists from EMS are: Dror Feiler, The Moth and Lilian von Haussen.

Guest composer

Robert Dow is guest composer at EMS all December 2009.

29 Oct 2009

13 Oct 2009

Digital PDP 15


Today we found parts of the old Digital PDP 15 from the old days when the studio was situated on Kungsgatan 8!

7 Oct 2009

Concerts Sweden will close down in 2011!

Since the mid 90s, EMS has been a department within Concerts Sweden (Rikskonserter). The present Government has now decided to close down Concerts Sweden in 2011. But that doesn't mean that we will be left homeless. Instead we will become a department within The Swedish National Collections of Music. We are thrilled to know that we can continue working as before and are looking forward to new challenges and collaborations.

/Isabel

Daniel Araya




Our new studio engineer Daniel Araya has arrived! We are very happy to have him on board and are looking forward to maintain and develop EMS together with him.

Welcome Daniel! say Ylva Skog, Mats Lindström, Göran Svensson and myself, Isabel Thomson.

6 Oct 2009

P2 Swedish Radio Europe-wide concert

9.05-10.30 pm on P2 Swedish Radio 6/10 2009. World premiere of pieces by Åke Parmerud, Lise-Lotte Norelius and Daniel Skoglund. Interview with Mats Lindström.

16 Sept 2009

Sukandar Kartadinata

will be holding a Sensor workshop at EMS 2-4 October 2009. On Thursday 1 October, he will be giving a seminar.

/Isabel

André Bartetzki

gave a much appreciated SuperCollider workshop at EMS in September 2009.

/Isabel

Sound art course at EMS

A sound art course, resulting in a masters, has now started at EMS. The course is a collaboration between EMS, Mats Lindström and DI, Anders Aare. They have invited several prominent sound artists, artists and composers to teach the five students who were selected to attend. A lot of the tuition is taking place in EMS studios. The five students come from different areas: radio documentary making, art, composing and singing/performing.

/Isabel

Benjamin Thigpen

has finished the piece he was working on at EMS in Stockholm and at GRM in Paris. It will be premiered on Radio France on 5 December 2009.

/Isabel

Guest composers

Guest composers this autumn at EMS include Carlos Giffoni and Mark O'Leary.

/Isabel

22 Aug 2009

EMS music archive searchable online

As a result of the EMS/National library digitisation project, all music created at EMS starting at 1964 is now searchable in the DISMARC portal. DISMARC is short for Discovering music archives, and one can read more about the project here. Thanks to Lena Forsgren at Svenskt visarkiv (Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research) and Gerda Koch at DISMARC, who made this possible!

To search for EMS material exclusively, go to Advanced search, select "Archive" as field and enter "ems". There are about 3800 items in all, but one can add additional search terms with "+" to narrow the search:



Please note that due to copyright restrictions, we unfortunately cannot provide audio files online. For now, you have to come to EMS to listen.

/Pär, your friendly neighbourhood librarian

20 Aug 2009

Courses at EMS

If you are interested in learning more about electroacoustic music or about how to make some yourself, there are several courses at EMS that gradually give you access to the studios. We also organise seminars and other evens that may be of interest.

Please note that all tuition is in Swedish. If you want to know more please contact us:
adm@ems.rikskonserter.se
Phone: 08-556 08 850
See also: www.ems.rikskonserter.se under courses!

New Studio Engineer at EMS

Our studio engineer of 40 years, Göran Svensson will sadly be retiring at the end of November. Göran has been a witness and key engineer in the history of the electroacoustic music evolution here at EMS!

On 1/10, the new studio engineer at EMS will be joining us! His name is Daniel Araya and has previously worked as a sound engineer etc at the Swedish Radio. He is also very big on analogue synthesizers and knows all about our Buchla and Serge here at EMS and can cure them when they are sick!

Those of you who have been to the Norberg festival know that he is one of the driving forces behind it and may have danced at his own club Camp 303!

/Isabel

3 Jun 2009

This year's Norberg festival 2009

will take place July 30, 31 and August 1 = three days of electroacoustic music, performance, electronica, experimental breakcore, theremin, you name it in Norberg. Don't miss this event!

/Isabel

20 May 2009

Benjamin Thigpen

was here for three weeks composing and teaching. He taught a course in Audiosculpt which was much appreciated by the students. We're hoping he will come back to teach and compose some more.

/Isabel

Alex Nowitz

has been guest composer at EMS between 11-25 May. During his stay here he has also managed to perform as a live-electronics musician, a performance that was much appreciated by all present.

/Isabel

Sabine Vogel

was guest composer here at EMS from 18-25 May 2009! Sabine is a flautist and lives in Potsdam. She concentrates on sound and improvisation and has appeared in many improvisation-related contexts in Germany and abroad.

/Isabel

29 Apr 2009

Early EMS history

Sanne Krogh Groth who is conducting research on the early history of EMS presented a paper at the Electroacoacoustic Music Studies Network International Conference in June 2008.

/Isabel

Jiménez, Galiana, Bjelkeborn

Inside3. This Spanish/Swedish music was performed at Fylkingen in Stockholm Sweden 21st april 2009 by Thomas Bjelkeborn (left) on laptop and wii controllers, Josep Lluise Galiana (middle) on Saxophones and Gregorio Jimenez (right) on laptop and interactive gadgets. This is the last 3 minutes of this 40 minute Suite composed during a residency at EMS in Stockholm.

Archives

Letters and other types of documentation relating to EMS were moved to Musikbiblioteket (the Music Library in Stockholm) yesterday and will be available for research in due course.

16 Apr 2009

Gregorio Jiménez

the president of AMEE Música Electroacústica de Espana is our guest composer for a week (15-23 April 2009).

7 Apr 2009

Benjamin Thigpen

will be working at EMS between 20/4 and 16/5. He will be teaching Audiosculpt and other things to the advanced students.
We look forward to his residence with us.

Great footage of EMS from 1984 in the entry below!

/Isabel

4 Apr 2009

Composer's radio etc.

The Society of Swedish composers broadcasts music by Swedish composers on the Internet under the name Composer's radio. This is not really news, since the broadcasting has been going on since 2005. What is new, though, is that all new programmes will be in English, starting March 2009. A nice complement to Electroacoustic Sweden!

Tamas Ungvary has posted another video from EMS. It's a jam session with Tamas and fellow composer/pianist Michael Smith.

Jesper Olsson writes about Swedish sound art and our new master's programme in daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (only in Swedish, sorry).

And welcome back, Isabel! /Pär

2 Apr 2009

Isabel back at EMS

I'm back in my job! :-) It's great to be back.
Digitizing the archives is great fun. It's really interesting listening to what was being done here in the early 90s. So I'm carrying on with that too. The EMS database will be something of a cultural treasure. Especially for researchers...

About the film, see entry beneath! That was from the days when EMS was located on Kungsgatan 8 in Stockholm. The studios are now on Söder Mälarstrand 61 (München bryggeriet), Stockholm too. Fantastic equipment… Things don't look as Star Trek-like anymore which is a shame really.

/Isabel

22 Mar 2009

Tamas Ungvary at EMS 1974

Here's a video of composer Tamas Ungvary using the EMS hybrid studio/synthesiser in 1974. The studio was equipped with 24 analogue oscillators, digitally controlled by an 18-bit DEC PDP-15 computer. Thanks for this wonderful piece of nostalgia, Tamas! /Pär

7 Mar 2009

Master's degree in sound art etc.

Since Isabel has left (although she now works in our digitisation project), I (Pär Johansson) will try to post some news here occasionally.

Dramatiska institutet offer a master's degree in sound art in collaboration with EMS.

I've created an aggregate feed for this and some other blogs with news and reflections on Swedish electroacoustic/contemporary music (mostly in Swedish).

/Pär

19 Feb 2009

Guest composers in spring

This spring 2009 EMS will be receiving the following guest composers:

Philippe Moënne-Loccoz, from Annecy in France (13-25 March)
Benjamin Thigpen, Paris, France (20 April to 16 May)
Neil Morris O'Connor, Dublin, Ireland (dates to be confirmed)
Gregorio Jimenez (15 April to 23 April)
Jose Luis (17 April to 23 April)

We look forward to having them in our studios and to getting to know them and their work.

/Isabel

18 Feb 2009

Changes at EMS

Well, in retrospect, the previous entry is quite ironic. Yes, we ARE suffering from the major crisis that Concerts Sweden/Rikskonserter are undergoing and yes, we have to put up with staff cuts. In fact I was laid off! In a few months' time I will no longer be working at EMS. I have had a wonderful time here at EMS which is a fantastic resource, quite unique in its kind. Anyone who is interested in the electroacoustic medium will agree that this is a great environment. Once you are a user of EMS you can book studio time and use up-to-date software and analogue synthesizers etc, and use the library with its collection of subject-related books. It's a brilliant working space. A bit like a public library with studios. Luckily, I'm still a user so I will go on coming to EMS and keep my fingers crossed that this is just a short interlude before something more constructive happens!

/Isabel

14 Jan 2009

Happy 2009! …?

What will 2009 have in store for EMS? This is the big question at the moment as we are waiting to see how our beloved institution will be affected by the major crisis at Concerts Sweden (Rikskonserter), under which we are a department since the mid nineties. It may mean staff cuts, which would be very unfortunate, in a time when we are actually expanding work-wise more than ever. More and more composers from all over the world are interested in coming here to work. Those who have been here say they love the atmosphere and find working and composing here very easy (that's because we really do our best to make them feel comfortable!). Over the past few years, our connection to the Norberg festival has grown and we are already looking forward to the summer. The archive project where Arkivet för Ljud och Bild (i.e. the department for audiovisiual media at the Swedish Royal Library) is a strong partner. That's just a few of all the projects in which we are involved. Keep your fingers crossed for us and don't hesitate to show your moral support!

/Isabel