Double vinyl with eight electronic music pieces, three of which are now on record for the first time. After having been effectively absent from the Swedish music scene since the mid-1980s, Roberta Settels’s music is back.

This time in an album, the first part of which is pretty much a remastered facsimile of her self-produced Music in Crisis from 1985 and the second a complement of works that have probably never been performed in public. The music was produced in Settels’s home studio, at Elektronmusikstudion EMS and at IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) in Paris. All the music on this reissue comes from Roberta Settels’s original tapes and is presented here in remastered form on vinyl where great care has been taken to retain the original tonal character of the compositions.

Roberta Settels (1929-2014) was a New York-born composer and artist. A former alumna of the Juilliard School, she came to Europe and Sweden in the 1950s, where she was active at EMS and the association Fylkingen during the 1970s. Settels moved in the eminent, intellectual circles of her day with the likes of photographer Lütfi Özkök, Heidi von Born, Henri Chopin and Ilmar Laaban. Later she applied to IRCAM in Paris, among other things, to work with and study for Iannis Xenakis. Eventually she built her own studio in her home in France, where some of this album’s repertoire was composed.

The repertoire on the original album Music in Crisis is a media-critical suite in four parts centred on the third piece. The compositions Landscape with 3 Tape-Recorders and …, Scenario, Isolation! Meinhof in Memoriam and P1 – Information? – challenge the workings of mass media and lambast the media in its various forms. The original album is through-composed not only in tone but also in the design that reminiscent of the newspaper article-like composition at the time and not least, the hand-screen printed album cover.