Passepartout Duo (Interview)
Today we’re listening to Passepartout Duo, made up of pianist Nicoletta Favari and percussionist Christopher Salvito. They met in 2015 at a musical festival in Maine, where they were performing in the same contemporary ensemble. We’re first playing their record from earlier this year, Radio Yugawara, which is a mellow collaboration with the Japanese duo INOYAMALAND. Passepartout Duo released their fourth LP on Friday, Argot, which is an experimental collection of synth and piano pieces, dreamed up during a residency at Stockholm’s Electronic Music Studio. A conversation with Nicoletta and Christopher follows the streaming links.
Radio Yugawara - Passepartout Duo & INOYAMALAND (42m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Argot - Passepartout Duo (35m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
What's your earliest memory of music?
Nicoletta: My parents would put on the radio to make me fall asleep when I was very little, and it’s a trick I have rediscovered recently for the evenings when it’s hard to quiet my thoughts down in the evening!
Christopher: My grandma played piano as a hobby, and I remember starting piano at a very young age with her. I can really remember each of the books we had in one of those opening piano benches.
How did you each start playing music individually?
N: The piano is my first and only instrument, and it happened a bit by chance as, when I was six, there were just two instrument classes offered in the village where I lived: piano and guitar. So my mum was the one that really took the initiative and who supported me in many ways to keep going, but I don’t think she could figure how long this would have continued. I never had such a thing as a band, which I think is a real pity!
C: I started piano I think also when I was around the same age, and started taking lessons also on violin a year or so after. I was always interested in picking up new instruments as a kid, but started playing percussion only when I was a teenager. That ended up being what stuck.
What were your first instruments, and when did you start creating music yourselves?
N: I immediately got access to an upright piano, but my education was really academic and traditional, and not even improvisation was really a part of it. It was only when I was working toward my Masters Degree that I started trying things out on the piano, but also experimenting with repertoire and staging and so on.
C: We already had an electric piano in the house, which was the instrument I learned on during my childhood. It’s kind of always been part of my life to make music. Some of my earliest musical memories were “writing music” as a kid. Of course it was all terrible, but I was genuinely interested and excited by it, and lucky to have teachers who cultivated this interest too.
How and when did you two meet and start playing music together?
Passepartout Duo was created just about a month after we met in July 2015 during a summer music festival in Maine (U.S.), where we were both musicians in a contemporary music ensemble. We were both about to end school, and we were sharing a very similar vision for what music could be in our immediate future, so we joined forces to make it happen! The first piece we played together was for vibraphone and piano, and it became the core for a residency application at the Banff Music Center in Canada that kicked the whole thing off.
Going back to your 2018 EP, Ólafsfjörður, who were the artists that inspired you to make music in that style?
Our inspirations have been continually changing through the years: Ólafsfjörður was our first attempt at writing music for ourselves, so it looks back at minimalism, post-minimalism, even conceptual art. But soon this new perspective that we had on the duo came more in focus, and I think by now we take direct or indirect inspiration from a lot of artists who we feel have a truly personal voice, and who can deliver it especially well in live performance. So in this way I am not sure if we can talk about a single style, we feel that our different projects often live in different words.
How was your residency at the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm?
We had a three week long residency at EMS, and it was an intense and beautiful period of creative energy. Somehow we feel like a good part of the album wrote itself, because the studio is set up in such a professional way and the instruments are so special, that everything sounds beautiful and magical. For example, we made use of EMS’ spring reverb – that is not something we would go out of our way to find, or that anybody could easily provide, so details like that contributed to the highly sophisticated voices of Argot. We also had brought with us the latest prototypes of our own synthesizer, the Chromaplane, and we used that too linked to the studios’ system. Most of the process for writing this album was very clear in our minds from start to finish, which is something extremely rare for us, so it was an interesting experience.
What other artists working at the intersection of electronic and acoustic instruments today inspire you two?
An ongoing inspiration of ours whose work deals with acoustic and electronic across the board is Dan Trueman, who is a violin and Norwegian Hardanger fiddle player, but also an instrument creator. His prepared digital piano has been very inspiring to us too!
Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.
Recently we have started learning more about the Italian electronic music scene of the last fifty years or so, and we find the work of Tiziano Popoli very intriguing.
What are you working on next?
At the moment we are working on the writing of new music and preparing a new live set that we hope to be touring next. We are on a residency in Taiwan, so there will be potentially influences of our experience here encapsulated in the music too, or at least in the choice of the instrumentation. And we are working on the last details for the production of the Chromaplane, the synthesizer that we have started to sell in collaboration with KOMA Elektronik. The product will start shipping within a few weeks, and we can’t wait to see what all of these new users will discover in it! It will definitely be inspiring for us, and it will start new conversations about the future of the instrument itself.
