In the summer of 2024, as the world buzzed about self-driving cars and AI-generated playlists, a 1985 Aston Martin Lagonda rolled into Barcelona’s Sónar+D festival with a different kind of intelligence.
Its new party trick? A built-in synthesizer that transformed the car’s leather-clad interior into a live music studio, blending the growl of a V8 engine with the warp and weft of analog synth waves.
The rare Lagonda has always been a misfit aristocrat. Designed in the 1970s with a razor-sharp wedge profile and a spaceship dashboard of early digital screens, it was a car that screamed “future” in an era of boxy sedans. According to Designboom, Aston Martin had outfitted one for the Sultan of Oman with a VHS player, rear-seat TV and crystal bar—gadgets that felt downright sci-fi for the time.
Decades later, Swiss strategist and electronic music producer Stephan Sigrist stumbled upon the rare artifact and envisioned it as his own canvas. The objective was to turn the Lagonda’s backseat into a playground for live music, where passengers could score their own road trip in real time. To realize his vision, Sigrist enlisted renowned Swedish designer Love Hultén, who is no stranger to surrealist music tech. For the Lagonda, he dismantled Roland’s Aira T-8 Beat Machine and S-1 Tweak Synth and rebuilt them into sleek, gunmetal-gray modules.
Passengers can tweak basslines or layer synths over the engine’s rumble. It’s a far cry from the silent, sanitized cabins of modern EVs, and perhaps that’s the point. The project nods to the ’70s and ’80s, when car interiors were cluttered with chunky buttons and luxury meant excess rather hyper-minimalism.
Check out images of the custom synth below.
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