S T U D I O

Studio’s West Coast, newly reissued and @bandcamp ’s Album of the Day: “West Coast stands as a glorious one-off: a vision of production perfection that still sounds as fresh as the day it hit the shelves.” Link in bio to shop vinyl, minidisc, CD, and cassette now stocked at select stores and shipping via @secretlydistribution . Video by @annapowelldenton

Best New Reissue nods for @officialstudioinformation (@atelje_ & @_rasmus_hagg_ ) "In the 2000s, Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, was host to a small scene of musicians making a mix of music similar to Studio, all punching above their weight in terms of international acclaim. Studio were no exception. But their music was idiosyncratic. It was damp, hedonistic, deep. It felt out of time, both familiar and futuristic, as, 19 years later, it still does. In imitating something ancient, they made something eternal." - @matthewschnipper for @pitchfork

West Coast LP (3rd.Ed. 2025 reissue) /preorder link in bio. Studio📝and 📸 up on Ghostly.com 🌊 ’’West Coast took shape throughout much of Studio’s existence. The earliest recordings trace back to sessions held at Lissvik’s art school and Hägg’s rehearsal space between 2001 and 2004. During this period, Lissvik co-founded the Service label, creating a platform to release music, produce T-shirts, and host events. Service organized large parties, and the art school served as both a club venue and office, in a style reminiscent of Factory Records and Haçienda. Aside from their three initial 7-inch releases on Service, they kept most of their music to themselves for several years. Hägg remembers, ”All these recordings were just piled up and we dusted them off and started to deconstruct and assemble them in a more drawn-out fashion.” In 2005, they left Service, flirted with breaking up, and then revisited material and wrote two new songs at Hägg’s Ferry Terminal Studio and Lissvik’s N.47 studio, which he jokingly dubbed the ”Beach Ball of Death sessions” due to the slow processing strain put on his Power Mac G4. Hägg continues, ”I had started a disco club night with a friend and we went deep down the rabbit holes of Balearics, space rock, and strange leftfield dancefloor stuff. This probably seeped into Studio’s output. Around the same time, with Dan slowing drums down to half tempo, finishing ‘No Comply’ and creating ‘Radio Edit’, the B-side of Studio’s first 12”, a West Coast blueprint was born.” 🌊

(via @ghostly ) West Coast, Studio’s seminal 2006 debut, reissued, remastered, and coming to streaming services on January 24, 2025 — link to pre-order and watch “Origin” in bio.

Some called Studio, the project of Swedish musicians Dan Lissvik (@atelje_ ) and Rasmus Hägg (@_rasmus_hagg_ ), “the missing link between The Cure and Lindstrøm,” Pitchfork heard Durutti Column and Can, as the duo’s story became swept up in a loosely developing scene — adjacent first to the label Service (Jens Lekman, The Whitest Boy Alive) and later Sincerely Yours (The Tough Alliance, jj) — and a precursor to the 2010s boom at the axis of electronic and psychedelic music guided by indie greats like Caribou, Four Tet, and Darkside.

West Coast, their seminal 2006 debut, captured a faraway romanticism of Balearic brushed up against Krautrock, disco, dub, and afro-beat, with pop lyricism lifted from new wave, all made modern by two art school grads in Gothenburg. First pressed in a small vinyl-only run via their own Information label, the album has been notably absent from most streaming services, and the internet’s record of its initial impact is all but fossilized from a bygone blog era, while its sound is simply untraceable to any one moment in music.

In the afterglow of the record’s 2007 reception, as their oft-mentioned un-Google-able name and Myspace page made rounds and West Coast was cemented as “one of the finest pieces of electronic music you’ll hear this year,” per The Guardian, Studio receded from view, clouded behind a mountain of remix requests and label bureaucracy. But both artists, now well into respective careers beyond Studio, have come to peace with West Coast as their most enduring effort together. 

West Coast is out January 24 on limited edition fog machine-colored vinyl, MiniDisc, cassette, and CD. A new clip for cult favorite “Origin” accompanies today’s news. Available globally next month via @secretlydistribution and fine shops worldwide.