This is Teenage Engineering’s EP-133 KOII, a portable composition powerhouse-shaped with the same loving care and attention as the company’s othercombines synthesiser, sampler and sequencer, allowing musicians to create sounds from scratch and build them up into songs. It’s an evolution of the PO-33 KO! sampler, one of the first of the Swedish company’s Pocket Operator series. These cult classics of modern music production, first introduced in 2015, are smartphone-sized devices that boil electronic music-making down to its bare essentials, with units dedicated to sampling, beats, basslines, glitches, beeps and leads, among others. This all-new model builds on the functionality of its pocket-sized progenitor and ups the quality of the industrial design. The form evokes the chunky styling of a 1970s desk calculator, with a plethora of physical controls, zinging orange detailing and a dense but highly-stylised user interface. With space for 999 samples, onboard effects, as well as an onboard microphone for sampling, speaker for playback, tactile analogue keys, MIDI connectivity and plenty of knobs to twiddle, the battery- or USB-C-powered device is sure to find its way to the top of many 2024 wishlists.
