Teenage Engineering

Jesper Kouthoofd, David Eriksson, Jens Rudberg and David Möllerstedt founded Teenage Engineering in Stockholm in 2005. Three of them had run a game company, and Möllerstedt had headed audio at the game studio EA DICE, so they came to synthesizers from games and graphics rather than from the old synth houses. Their first product, the OP-1, was announced at the Frankfurt Musikmesse in 2009 and went on sale in 2011. It is a thin aluminum slab with 24 keys, an OLED screen, a built-in FM radio and a four-track digital tape deck, and the limits of that tape are why people finish songs on it. When the screens ran out in late 2018, used units sold above retail, and production came back in February 2019 at a higher price. The Pocket Operators followed in 2015 as a collaboration with Cheap Monday, then the OP-Z, the OP-1 field in 2022 and the EP-133 K.O. II sampler. Outside work runs from the Frekvens collection for IKEA and the crank on Panic's Playdate to the Rabbit r1. When Carl Pei built Nothing, Kouthoofd became its creative lead and Tom Howard its head of design. In 2012 the company sold knob caps that let the OP-1 drive Lego gears and motors.