Love Synthesizers is returning to Synth Symposium 2026 in Sofia, Bulgaria through artist ambassador Roberta Dimana, who will represent the Icelandic synth company across the June 20 and 21 event.
The Love Synthesizers team will not attend in person this year, so Dimana will be the one putting FIRST LOVE in front of the festival crowd through demonstrations, conversations, and possible live performance use. That is a useful angle for this kind of instrument because FIRST LOVE is not the kind of synth that benefits from a spec sheet alone. People need to see it touched, played, questioned, and pushed a little.
Synth Symposium is still young, now entering its second year, yet it already has a clear role in Eastern Europe’s synth community. The Sofia event brings together electronic musicians, instrument designers, modular users, and synth fans for two days of performances, workshops, product demos, and community programming.
FIRST LOVE Gets A Musician-Led Demo In Sofia
FIRST LOVE is the flagship instrument from Love Synthesizers, founded in Reykjavík in 2023 by musician, designer, and inventor Kári Halldórsson. The synth combines animated touchscreen interaction with tactile knobs and buttons, with the goal of making FM synthesis feel easier to approach without stripping out the depth that experienced users still want.
That is the part worth paying attention to. FM synthesis can be powerful, yet it can also feel cold or overly technical when the interface keeps the user too far away from the result. FIRST LOVE is trying to solve that through a more visual and hands-on experience, where the musician can connect the sound to movement, shape, and direct control.
Roberta Dimana is a fitting person to carry that into a festival setting. She is an electronic musician, multi-instrumentalist, content creator, and synth enthusiast, and she has recently started exploring FIRST LOVE inside her own creative workflow. That puts the demo closer to real use rather than a sales-floor presentation.
A Continued Link Between Reykjavík And Sofia
Love Synthesizers took part in the first Synth Symposium in 2025, and the connection to Sofia clearly stuck. During that trip, members of the team also explored the mountains around the city, with footage from that visit later becoming part of the company’s teaser content.
Kári Halldórsson said the festival made a strong impression during its first year, pointing to the organizers, the atmosphere, and Sofia’s creative energy as reasons the company wanted to stay connected. Love Synthesizers is also planning to return in person for a future edition, including a planned 2027 appearance.
That continuity gives this year’s appearance more context. This is not just a synth being sent to a festival for a quick demo slot. It is a young company staying connected to a young synth event and letting an artist carry the instrument into the room while the full team is away.
For attendees, the appeal is simple: FIRST LOVE will be there in a musician’s hands. For Love Synthesizers, it keeps the instrument present in a community that seems to matter to the company early in its story.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
