Long Live Radio
The OB-4 by Teenage Engineering is officially a portable speaker but one which includes features such as an ambient drone, a metronome, and a “musical mantra box”. (image: Choreo).
I was initially surprised to learn that Teenage Engineering had designed an FM radio. Radio?
It just seemed so old-fashioned, particularly for a studio that made its name with cutting edge synths like the OP-1 (2011) and the OP-Z (2018) – devices that married functional complexity with crystal clear industrial design. I don’t understand synths because I’m musically illiterate, but even I love those pieces. By contrast, I do understand radio, which tells me that it must be a dead technology. So what is Teenage doing messing around in the past? “You know,” says Thomas Howard, the Stockholm studio’s vice head of design, “I think you’re onto something there.”
Of course, the OB-4 isn’t just a radio. “Actually, a lot of people were very angry and upset with us that we’ve pushed it as an FM radio,” says Howard. “Doesn’t it have digital audio, DAB, or whatever that radio standard that’s only used in Norway is?” Strictly speaking, the OB-4 is a portable loudspeaker, but that’s where things stop feeling quite so strict. The device is equipped with an endless looping tape, meaning that a quick twist of its motorised dials lets you rewind live radio to cut up, loop and time-bend whatever is being broadcast. “What can a speaker be other than something that just takes in a signal and spits it back out?” asks Howard.
“Radio is cool because it’s both very easy to receive a signal, and it has that super live, local feeling to it – a sense of being connected to your community which we’ve all missed.”
Meanwhile, a disk mode sets up the radio feed as a test lab, housing a number of experimental functions that Teenage will add to over time: so far, it includes ambient drone formed from radio snippets, a metronome, and a “musical mantra box” that sounds like doing yoga with robots. “We’re really interested in active listening as opposed to passive consumption,” says Howard. “Radio is cool because it’s both very easy to receive a signal, and it has that super live, local feeling to it – a sense of being connected to your community which we’ve all missed. It’s a good platform for the future.”
The more I think about it, actually, the more this dialogue between past and future seems essential to Teenage. Its Pocket Operator synths (2015-) smuggled contemporary connectivity into 1980s-style Game and Watch devices, while its OD-11 speaker (2014) was an immaculately re-engineered, but otherwise faithful recreation of a 1974 original by audio engineer Stig Carlsson. “For us it’s interesting to see how we can add just one thing to something familiar to transform it entirely,” says Howard. The studio delights in delving into the history of electronics, and finding forgotten devices and formats before messing around just enough to restore them to relevance. “We don’t really have a grand plan: it’s more sticking stuff together and seeing what works.”
So, I ask Howard, what does happen when you start rewinding and looping FM radio? “Long live radio, I would say!” he replies.
Words by Oli Stratford
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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