From Caprice, comes Roberta Settels' “Music in Crisis”, quite possibly the most historically important archival release of the year. The most expansive collection ever dedicated to the work of the American born, primarily Stockholm based electroacoustic composer / pioneer, comprising the near entirety of her known works from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, recorded between her home studio, EMS in Stockholm, and IRCAM in Paris, this astounding double LP is nothing short of a revelation that centers Settels as a visionary voice and one of the most sinfully neglected composers in the 20th century experimental sound.

Recently when discussing Lisa Ullén’s brilliant LP, “Heirloom”, for the Stockholm based imprint, “Fönstret”, we pointed toward Sweden being a long, but quiet, rumbling force in the context of experimental music. Be it free improvisation, avant-garde composition, or electronic music, among a great deal more, the country’s artists have consistently delivered singular and distinct statements into the sonorous landscape for the better part of a century. Caprice’s latest, “Music in Crisis”, the most expansive collection ever dedicated to the work of the American born composer, Roberta Settels, who lived and worked in Stockholm between 1953 and her death in 2014, stands as a further proof of this towering truth.

Born in New York in 1929, Roberta Settels is a shadowy figure in the history of avant-garde and experimental music. Outside of a very small number of devotees to this territory of sonic creativity, she remains almost entirely unknown; something that the pure brilliance of the works comprised by Caprice’s “Music in Crisis” collection can’t help but change. Following her studies at the legendary Juilliard School of Music in New York, following her relocation to Sweden in 1953, Settels worked steadily across the 1970s and 80s at the electronic studios EMS and IRCAM (alongside and with Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez), as well as in her own studio, creating compositions that she described as "music for spiritual survival”, as well as composing for TV, film, and radio, before disappearing from the world of music sometime during the 1980s, and has remained largely and tragically forgotten ever since.

Like a great many of the most important composers working in the context of experimental electronic and electroacoustic music during roughly the same period, Settels was most likely a victim of gender bias in an almost exclusively male dominated world. All indications are that, in addition to being artistically brilliant and singular in her approach to the idiom, she was fiercely principled. Following disagreements with Caprice - the Swedish state owned record label - regarding the militant leftist political content of her lone LP, Isolation! Meinhof In Memoriam - a work dedicated to the Red Army Faction co-founder Ulrike Meinhof, composed shortly after she was found dead in her cell in 1976 - she opted to release the album on her own Music in Crisis imprint in 1985, and shortly after removed all of her tapes from the archives of EMS (shortly before her death, she placed them in the archive of Fylkingen).

The first LP is a fully remastered vinyl edition of 1985’s “Isolation! Meinhof In Memoriam” with the second LP offered over to the work, “P4”, originally issued on the compilation, “Text-Sound Compositions 11: Stockholm, 1974”, and three previously unreleased works created at EMS in Stockholm and IRCAM in Paris. With the exception of a single long-form composition, which is not included, “Music in Crisis” issues the entirety of Settels’ currently known works.

Regarding “Isolation! Meinhof In Memoriam” Settels stated: “This work was realised shortly after Ulrike Meinhof died [in 1976]. It is dedicated to her memory because she symbolized, through her life, her imprisonment, her death, the destiny of countless intellectuals who in one way or another offer their lives for their convictions. The subject matter of the piece is not, however, political, but rather an attempt to transmit the tensions of silence and isolation." Divided into four parts - “Landscape With 3 tape-recorders”, “Scenario”, “Isolation (Meinhof In Memoriam)”, and “P1 Ð Information?” - the work is a minimal masterstroke for electronics and tape that perfectly achieves the representations of complex physiological being that Settels set out to through a chasmic sense of space, subdued vocalisations, and tense textures and tonal and timbral combinations.

“Music in Crisis” second LP dedicated to “P4” and three previously unreleased works - “Landskap”, “Sequences”, and “Menagerie” - created at EMS in Stockholm and / or IRCAM in Paris, collectively open a broader and more dynamic perspective on Settels’ compositional focus, methodologies and practice, ranging from aggressive densities encountered within “P4”; the shimmering ambiences of “Landskap”, constructed from complex durational harmonics; to the bubbling playfulness of “Menagerie”, to the remarkably intricate and diverse work, “Sequences”, which is arguably the composer’s most accomplished known work.

Truly singular and somehow sitting outside of its own time, the release of Roberta Settels’ “Music in Crisis” is a monumental historical event, returning a significant voice in 20th century avant-garde electroacoustic composition to our ears, in some cases for the very first time.