Like so many kids growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Love Hultén spent untold hours at the arcade, pumping change into boxy, blinking monoliths. Now 39, the audiovisual artist and woodworker based in Gothenburg, Sweden considers those early years of joyous button mashing as a clear origin point for his whimsical, eye-catching custom synths and consoles. “I was raised by arcade games,” Hultén says over email.
Hultén has spent the past 12 years merging hand-hewn carpentry and MIDI interfaces. The effect is surreal yet familiar, and his designs somehow feel born of both childlike nostalgia and precise engineering—Lego meets Le Corbusier. “Nostalgia is involved to a certain extent, but it’s not looking backwards,” Hultén assures me. “It’s taking steps in different directions simultaneously by using fragments from both the past and today, creating unique and balanced objects. I’ve always been into retrofuturism and sci-fi from the ’50s and ’60s.” He is especially interested in subverting how we operate machines—why rotate a knob, his work asks, when you can twist a fake eyeball instead?
Among his madcap contraptions, Hultén has crafted a synthesizer incorporating 25 sets of chattering teeth toys, a music box-like instrument that spits out metal marbles, and a bizarre, semi-acoustic drum machine tricked out with self-playing percussion components and golden hands that “clap.”
After starting on a fine art and graphic design course at the University of Gothenburg, Hultén shifted his focus to woodworking and object design. Using traditional craftsmanship methods, he produced game consoles and audiovisual sculptures, their clean lines and control panels a reminder of his graphics background. For his final project in 2014, Hultén created the first iteration of his ongoing R-Kaid-R series. The portable walnut-and-brass console, which can store over 10,000 games, was the first piece of Hultén’s to go viral and remains a popular item in his catalog. Last year, one Marshall B. Mathers commissioned a bespoke R-Kaid-R, inlaid with the Eminem Superman logotype in mother of pearl.
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Hultén, who takes on roughly 15 commission jobs a year, has also built pieces for A$AP Rocky, Danger Mouse, Michael B. Jordan, and Argentinian producer Bizarrap, to name a few. (His work typically costs between three and nine thousand dollars, depending on size and complexity.) A musician himself—he plays organ, synthesizer, and bass in four different bands ranging from post-punk to art-pop—Hultén chats with his clients, many of whom have a narrative, a visual, or a piece of music to stimulate the design process. But ultimately, Hultén works alone, and is given creative reign over the end product.
If nostalgia is a more subdued force in Hultén’s work, touch and play are formal tenets. As music technology shrinks and becomes increasingly sterile, a Love Hultén piece is a vessel for joy and curiosity. “In a world full of touch screens and over-thought menu diving, I think people are in real need of simplicity, tactility, and physical feedback,” he says. “The personality of an object is another aspect. Commercial products go through strict and compromising processes that eventually kill the product. I’m a small-scale, one-man studio. I don’t need to compromise.”
Love Hultén: As a young boy I used to tear electronics apart trying to understand their insides. During university I stumbled upon wood and fell in love. I started to combine woodworking with electronics and just kept making stuff. I was raised by arcade games and ended up doing a tribute cabinet piece for my bachelor exam in 2014. That piece went pretty viral, and I started taking my first orders. The industry is pretty monotonous, and I guess I offered something different. I had no competition and that put my pieces in the spotlight and gave me a lot of creative freedom.
I loved the Metal Slug series, that one ate a lot of my coins as a kid. Did a lot of Contra as well, as well as classics like Pac-Man and Tempest. My ultimate go-to game was always Mega Man 2 and 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I always enjoyed playing those games using a joystick rather than the standard NES gamepad. The physical feedback gave me a sense of precision and control that pads didn’t provide. The R-Kaid-R was basically a manifestation of that, a personal tactile take on portable consoles.
I did arcade cabinets for a lot of years but grew tired of repeating myself. I was playing in a band at the time and had a newfound passion for analog synths. I didn’t expect it to work from a selling point at all, I just wanted to have some fun. I’ve been doing commissioned synths for over four years now so I guess I’m doing something right.
I tried that once, but I’m a very shy guy and didn’t like the attention. I just want to hide in the back and prefer other artists using my work on stage. I’m also doing solo projects; right now I’m working on a synth-based music score for an upcoming game titled Invasive Recall.
I’ve always had a special love for those bio stations seen in various sci-fi movies. They’re taking something very familiar and they place it into a strange abnormal context. I wanted to create something inspired by that, a biolab environment—half human, half alien. Desert Songs was a big personal project of mine, and something I’ve been into for a while: It translates biodata into MIDI. It’s not magic, and the plants are not composing, it’s simply biofeedback creating true organic “randomness”—tiny changes in electrical current.
The plants act as variable resistors. Cacti was used for this project due to their very sparse and sporadic activity. I made a second smaller piece shortly after, Tegel, this time using a small deciduous tree for more bio-activity. This installation was visually inspired by older Per Kirkeby brick sculptures. I would love to take this concept further, maybe public art somehow.
There’s a lot of them. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Doctor Who, early Star Trek. I also got a lot of inspiration from games like Myst and Myst Riven. The connections are mostly atmospheric, but I do like chunky consoles, blinking stuff, glass domes, and tactile controls.
Eight years back, for unknown reasons, I stocked up on cheap chatter teeth. I had no idea what to do with them, I just figured the day would come. A few years later Simone’s video popped into my feed, and there it was. I really liked the concept, but the visual approach was pretty dull and DIY. It was basically an octave worth of teeth placed onto this white plate in a four-by-three grid, hooked up to a MIDI keyboard. I wanted to try my take on it. But rather than using the teeth for acoustic sounds like Simone did, I used uncompressed vocal samples and then just used the teeth for mechanical visualization. I decided on a five-by-five grid—that’s 25 sets of plastic teeth with each set representing a unique note on the keyboard.
I still favor my Bivalvia Synthesis from 2018. It was just such a fun project, and they came out really beautiful. It’s a simple toy-like clamshell synth based around the Axoloti Core—a dedicated hardware board that combines with a very user-friendly patching software. I’ve used the Axoloti for other fun projects as well, such as my speech synthesizer Mr. Typo and the semi-acoustic drum machine Slagwerk101.
Text-files are fed to Mr. Typo via USB, and it will rearrange the content in real-time and output odd and irregular sentence structures, using Markov chains and vocal synthesis. Speech characteristics, gender pitch, and additional effects can be adjusted via eyes and teeth.
I just wanted to do something really goofy for a change. I went to speech therapy when I was younger and was very fascinated by their syntheses tools. I wanted to play with that somehow, and I had these realistic eyeballs laying around. That was that. Mr. Typo comes with or without meat.
Commissioned audio pieces, mostly private clients. I do have a few interesting collaborative projects in the making, but that’s nothing I can speak of at this moment. I never know what’s coming, that’s the beauty of my work. I’ve been doing this for over 12 years now, and I’m not bored yet. Combining woodwork and electronics is like driving an endless road with exciting exits everywhere. If I’m ever sick and tired in a current field or feel stuck in repetition, I can always take another exit.
