Nordic
Analog
Network

01

Establish Permanent Structural Funding for Independent Music Technology Centres

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania each lack a permanently funded national centre for electronic music and sound art equivalent to EMS or Notam. Cultural funding frameworks should include a dedicated structural funding line for independent organisations operating at the intersection of technology, sound art, and experimental music — multi-year, core-funded rather than project-based, designed to support open-access studio infrastructure, artist residencies, and knowledge exchange. The Nordic model demonstrates that state funding at arm's length from government, through arts councils or performing arts agencies, is the most effective structural arrangement.

02

Commission Systematic Documentation of Baltic Electronic Music History

The histories of electronic music in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under Soviet conditions have not yet been systematically documented and made available as a living resource for contemporary practitioners. Ministries should commission and fund this documentation work through partnerships between academic institutions and independent organisations. The University of Helsinki's work on Kurenniemi is the model: patient, rigorous scholarship that turns obscure inventors into recoverable traditions.

03

Develop a Structural Funding Instrument for Cross-Border Independent Music Organisations

A new funding instrument — perhaps developed jointly by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Baltic ministerial framework — should support permanent cross-border infrastructure: shared studio access, reciprocal residency rights, pooled equipment maintenance, and sustained organisational capacity rather than isolated projects. This is the missing layer between the national structural funding that Nordic institutions like EMS enjoy and the project-by-project existence of Baltic equivalents.

04

Weight Structural Network Impact Heavily in Evaluation Criteria

Short-term network funding of the kind that supported NAN's initial phase has an outsized return on investment in a field where the primary obstacle is not talent or ambition but connectivity and coordination. The connections forged through NAN — between UHMRL and Erica Synths, between ECCM and KMH, between ensemble EMA and hcmf// — would not have existed without dedicated network funding. Structural impact of this kind should be weighted heavily in evaluation criteria.

05

Formalise Partnerships with Independent Organisations

Baltic music academies should develop formal partnership frameworks with independent organisations: agreements that give independent organisations access to academic resources in exchange for access to studio infrastructure, practitioner knowledge, and experimental programming space. The NAN model — in which KMH and UHMRL contribute methodological frameworks while Erica Synths and ECCM provide hands-on infrastructure — is a template for this kind of structured interdependence.

06

Invest in Documentation and Transmission of Regional Electronic Music Heritage

The University of Helsinki's work on Kurenniemi's instruments demonstrates the value of academically rigorous attention to regional history. Baltic music academies should develop equivalent research programmes focused on their own histories: the Soviet-era studios, the improvised instruments, the composers and engineers who worked in the margins of official cultural structures, and the exiled avant-garde whose contributions have been absorbed into Swedish and Canadian cultural history.

07

Accept the Academy's Role as Transmitter, Not Initiator, of Experimental Innovation

The most generative contribution academic music institutions can make to experimental electronic music is to serve as its memory, methodological conscience, and bridge to wider publics and policy structures — not to claim leadership of innovation. This requires an honest internal reckoning with the structural limits of academisation, and active support for the independent organisations that perform the laboratory function the academy cannot.

08

Build Toward Permanence: From Network to Institution

NAN's long-term ambition should be to generate the conditions for something more permanent: a shared Nordic-Baltic resource centre for experimental electronic music that outlasts any single project cycle — a jointly operated studio space, a shared residency programme, a distributed instrument library, or a research consortium. The specific form matters less than the commitment to permanence as a strategic goal, and to the funding advocacy required to achieve it.