"Stenberg composed the five pieces that make up Monument during a residency in Athens in 2017, and made additional recordings at Osnabrück University in Germany. The pieces were composed using a Synthi 100, a large analogue synthesizer built in the 1970s by the British company EMS London Ltd. EMS is perhaps best known for its VCS3, a portable voltage-controlled synthesizer invented in 1969. Designed by EMS founders Peter Zinovieff, David Cockerell and Tristram Cary, the VCS3 was one of the earliest commercially available analogue synthesizers. It is instantly recognisable, with its unusual desk-like shape, no keyboard, and instead of the patchbay and cables we might expect from a modular synthesizer, a matrix where the player creates their patches using pins. The Synthi 100 looks like, and indeed in some ways is, a greatly expanded VCS3, multiplying its arrangements of oscillators, filters and noise generators across three control panels and adding an early iteration of a digital sequencer...."
Fylkingen Records, 2023