This tee shirt design is one of a series of reissues based on the Sweden Band tees. Band, you say? Yes, before Sweden Unlimited was a digital design agency Sweden's three founders existed as a three-piece Casiocore-electro-rock band starting in the late 1990s. Playing live at nearly every live music venue or nightclub below 14th Street, Leja, Alex, and Richard were primarily known as just Sweden (the band). But even aspiring rock stars need to eat and pay rent, so at night, we may have played Club Spa for drink tickets; during the day, we were making some of the earliest e-commerce sites and flash websites for New Yorks fashion insiders. You can read more of this origin story here>>
There is a unique story to this piece of art. What looks like a vintage hybrid of a drum machine or synth is an entirely invented musical instrument made to resemble a combination of our instruments. Browing elements from Leja's Casio Keyboard, the Casiotone CT-310, Alex's Electric guitar, Richard's Casio DG-20 guitar synth, and our Roland TR707 Drum Machine, we created this imaginary music machine for the cover of our debut CD called CD-8T12 (standing for Compact Disk, 8 tracks, 12 songs)
At the time, Leja (the original girl coder, Sorry Karlie Kloss Leja has you beat by nearly a decade as a female model that codes) was our Flash 4 action scripting master coder. She took this illustration and made it a working Flash page where you can play this virtual instrument programmed with loops from our respective instruments. You could go to our Swedenmusicmachine.com website, press the keys and knobs on our machine, and make music that sounds like our band. Click the buttons on top for a drumbeat. Turn up a knob for Alex's fuzzed-out guitar featuring the Lovetone CheeseSource pedal and play the keys on the keyboard to evoke Lejas favorite presets from her Casio Keyboard.
These reissues will be a much better quality than the color xeroxed iron-on transfers we had to run to Kinkos to print. So get yours soon and relive some of that Y2K magic.