State Music is not simply an album of vintage synthesizer studies; it is Laurent Güdel’s attempt to listen politically to the very conditions that made those sounds possible. Around 2015, after a wave of layoffs rationalised as “economic necessity,” Güdel found himself with precarious time and a need to reclaim it. Rather than retreat, he applied for public grants and, between 2018 and 2020, began arranging residencies in some of the most emblematic studios of electronic music: EMS in Stockholm, Radio Belgrade, KSYME in Athens, Willem Twee in Den Bosch, followed later by Columbia University’s Computer Music Center in New York. State Music, an 86‑minute LP curated in dialogue with EAC - Les Halles (Porrentruy) and HeK (Basel), is one axis of a larger project that also includes multichannel concerts, texts, interviews and exhibitions. It treats these institutions not as temples to be revered, but as terrains to be questioned from the inside.

From the outset, Güdel chose to resist the lure of fetishism. The historic consoles and first‑generation modular systems he encountered are undeniably iconic, but his interest lay less in their aura than in what they reveal about ownership, access and power. Long before he put hands to patch cables, he was suspicious of his own attraction to 1950s electroacoustic aesthetics - the grain of tape, the laboratory atmosphere preserved in black‑and‑white photographs of WDR Cologne, GRM Paris and other early studios. State Music grows out of asking why those images felt so seductive while he was rehearsing with rock bands in Swiss bomb shelters: they were at the controls; he was in the shelters. That comparison becomes a guiding metaphor for the project. If DIY was the economic and organisational model of his formative scenes - fully independent, scrappy, materially constrained - what happens when a self‑taught musician enters spaces built on the opposite premise, where infrastructure, wages and prestige depend on the state, national broadcasters, universities or even corporations whose reach rivals governmental power?

Rather than approaching this history as a musicologist, Güdel uses State Music to stage a kind of self‑authored fieldwork at the edge of political economy and sound. His questions cut across the recordings like an invisible grid: Who commissioned these studios and why? Which regimes welcomed them, which ignored them? How did military research, communications industries and cultural policy intertwine to make early electronic music thinkable, fundable and respectable? What does it mean to improvise on machines whose genealogies run through cold war strategy, soft power, and the “military‑industrial‑academic‑cultural complex” that scholars like Martin Brody have mapped? The pieces on the LP are not illustrations of these questions, but they are recorded under their influence, letting historical and institutional pressure seep into the way he plays and edits sound.

Musically, State Music works through juxtaposition and tension. Güdel improvises on the available instruments and systems of each studio - modular racks, tape machines, early digital tools - but he refuses to treat them as neutral tools. You hear test‑tone purities interrupted by mechanical coughs, drones frayed by room noise, precise synthetic gestures undercut by the grain of decaying infrastructure. The compositions move between clinical focus and rough‑edged montage, mirroring his desire to connect official narratives of innovation with the more awkward realities of access and hierarchy. At times, the pieces feel like guided tours where the equipment itself speaks; at others, they register as acts of resistance, stressing or misusing the machines to expose the limits of the utopian promises they once carried.

Crucially, Güdel frames “state music” not as a genre but as a counter‑pole to DIY. Where DIY insists on autonomy, self‑financing and horizontal organisation, state music denotes complete dependence on external funding and hierarchical structures - on national radio, public universities, research laboratories, or corporate giants like Philips and RCA whose agendas intertwine with governmental priorities. State Music asks what it means to operate along that spectrum, oscillating between imperial and national projects, between infrastructure and superstructure, public and private, artisanal tinkering and institutional science, working‑class practice and bourgeois patronage. The record never resolves these oppositions but lets them flicker across its surfaces: moments of almost scientific restraint giving way to passages where the sound seems to revolt against its own conditions, surging into saturated, unstable masses.

The project’s theoretical arm is fed not only by music history but by critical voices from economics and political theory. Concepts like Benjamin Bürbaumer’s “structural interdependence” between state and capital, or the notion that cultural policy must foster “good” conditions for accumulation to reproduce itself, echo through Güdel’s framing of grants, cultural funding and artistic labour. Yet the tone remains resolutely self‑reflexive. He is not mounting an abstract critique of “electronic music” as such; he is interrogating his own practice, asking how his sounds are shaped, enabled and constrained by the institutions that host and fund them. State Music is his way of listening back at that entanglement.

The LP’s material production reflects this network of relations. Curated by Philippe Queloz (EAC - Les Halles, Porrentruy) and Boris Magrini (HeK - House of Electronic Arts, Basel), mastered by Francisco Meirino and wrapped in artwork by current matters, it also incorporates images by Lucas Dubuis (studio photographs) and Aladin Borioli (EMS documentation). Borioli, an artist, photographer, beekeeper and anthropologist, is a crucial figure in the project’s origin story: his invitation to collaborate on a “film without images” about Moroccan beekeeping in Inzerki, combining interviews and hive recordings, modelled a methodology that slips between art, fieldwork and the humanities. That experience nudged Güdel toward his own version of field research, trading Apiaries for EMS consoles, but retaining the same curiosity about how technology, labour and environment co‑produce what we hear.

Supported by the Commission francophone chargée des affaires culturelles générales, the Ville de Bienne and the Canton of Bern, State Music ultimately operates as both an album and a critical lens. It documents time spent in legendary rooms, but refuses to mythologise them. Instead, it invites listeners to hear electronic sound against the backdrop of the apparatuses that made it possible: states and quasi‑states, cultural policies and economic climates, bombs and shelters, control panels and precarious freelancers. In pushing music “out the door” to think about politics and economics, Güdel finds that it inevitably sneaks back through the window - altered, contextualised, and charged with new questions about what it really means to plug into history.