About Lydskatten

Lydskatten preserves, shares, and activates the cultural heritage of Danish electronic music.

Lydskatten (‘the Sound Treasure’) is a rich collection of music, photos, recordings, film, instruments, equipment, notes, and all kinds of documentation of a vibrant music culture dating all the way back to the 1950s.

The vision of Lydskatten is to create a physical center and meeting place where everyone has free and full access to this vast treasure of music, digitized works, and rare machines – so that they are not only preserved for the future, but also utilized and activated.

The founders of Lydskatten

The initiative was launched in 2019 by composers Gunner Møller Pedersen and Fuzzy as well as Frederik Birket-Smith, director of the electronic music institution Strøm, after a meeting in Fuzzy’s kitchen, where the ideas of ‘a living archive’ emerged.

Strøm works to promote electronic music in Denmark and serves as the operator for Lydskatten.

Composers Fuzzy (Jens Wilhelm Pedersen, 1939–2022) and Gunner Møller Pedersen (1943) have created a significant amount of groundbreaking electronic music and spatial electroacoustic sound art. Lydskatten aims to ensure that their work archives and unique collection of studio equipment and instruments benefit as many people as possible.

LYDSKATTEN CONSISTS OF THREE CLOSELY CONNECTED PARTS:

Archiving and digitization
The music, stored on analog reel tapes, hard drives, and digital tapes, is rescued and digitized in high resolution for the future. During digitization, each recording and sound work is cataloged in an archive with notes.

Communication and performances
Once the music and sound recordings are digitized and preserved for the future, they are performed and communicated—for example, during the Strøm Festival, in the Sound Wells at Frederiksberg, and at TICKON on Langeland. The original material from Gunner Møller Pedersen and Fuzzy’s MUSIKZAG concert at the Glyptotek in 1972 was, for instance, performed and reinterpreted by three younger electronic musicians during the Strøm Festival 2024 (together with Gunner Møller Pedersen himself).

Residencies and studios
In addition to rescuing the music and sound recordings, the instruments and the studio equipment are preserved. All the gear is collected and made accessible so that new generations of composers, artists, and creators can draw inspiration from the past to create new music for the future. This is one of the cornerstone ideas in Fuzzy and Gunner’s concept of the ‘living archive’: That the materials live on, are reinterpreted, and are used in new and creative ways.