The Fuzzy Synth
20 x 20 x 11 cms
wood, yarn and electronic components
Passepartout Duo
We wanted to balance out the “techyness” of all the electronic language and decided textile is a very human-friendly medium.
The Liminaphone
50 x 30 x 8 cms
wood, fabric, electronic components
Passepartout Duo are Nicoletta Favari from Italy and Christopher Salvito from the USA. They are both from musical backgrounds and have recently started to incorporate textiles into some of their musical projects. They have been travelling between projects and tours for the last three years and I interviewed them to find out more about their latest work The Fuzzy Synth and The Liminaphone.
What is your artistic and musical background? Did you study or are you self taught?
We’ve been working together as a collaborative couple for the last five years under the name Passepartout Duo. We have a classical music background having trained at conservatories, with Nicoletta studying piano and Chris studying percussion, but ever since we began working together our practice has developed in a lot of different directions. So musically, we’re very far from self taught, since we studied for years, but so many other aspects of what we do were just learned along the way. Everything we do relates to sound, but increasingly our projects are more tangential to installation art and multidisciplinary collaborations.
These new paths we’ve started all began from meeting and collaborating with artists from different backgrounds, beginning to compose our own music, and finally deciding to take over the entire creative process from instrument creation to performance. That’s how we came to acquire new skills, just talking with people who know better than us, and also teaching ourselves with a lot of research on the Internet. Often the institutions we work with are also very supportive with both their facilities and contacts.
And of course, travelling so much has been our best education yet!
Why did you choose the name Passepartout?
For us the word Passepartout gave the idea of a master key that could open all the doors, an answer to multiple questions. Over the years though it has induced different interpretations, from the character in a novel by Jules Verne to the idea of passepartout in framing to make the content stand out in the best way. In all, we find the duo to be our own key to the world.
Why did you incorporate textiles into your projects?
Our previous project saw us building new musical instruments for ourselves, by exploring the sonic properties inherent to wood and metal materials. The joy of working with our hands and to discover a completely new approach to sound naturally brought us a desire to develop this aspect of our work further.
We had also developed a certain interested in exploring the DIY world of analog synthesisers, which is interestingly experimental but also in many ways quite homogenized in its aesthetics. Therefore, we decided we wanted to have our own take at it, and to balance out the “techyness” of all the electronic language we decided textile would have been a very human-friendly medium.
Having met over the years many artists, it is remarkable to count the net majority of the ones working with textile art. All of them have always had with us very passionate conversations and really inspired us with their work, so I think this fascination took some time to ripen before finally coming to fruition. While we were in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, we were offered the opportunity of collaborating with a fashion company based at the nearby city of Hangzhou, and they were the ones providing us with scrap yarn and fabric.
Tell me more about Fuzzy Synth and the Liminaphone
The Fuzzy Synth proposes an alternative to the compulsively materialistic context for which instruments are designed and created. In an effort to combat an existing tendency to create machines that are densely populated with marketable features, the Fuzzy Synth instead proposes a decidedly unintuitive interface meant to spark different creative possibilities in performance.
Covered in fibers woven on a DIY frame loom, the synthesizer introduces an imaginary landscape to its performer, where the act of patching cables and playing is linked to the natural ecosystem suggested by the textile art. In this case, the design of the woven part is inspired by our memories of past escapes into the overgrown Finnish forests, with all its richness of mushrooms, berries, and moss.
The creation process was led by questions related to the instrument’s efficiency and functionality, intuition, and performativity.
There is nothing perfect in our DIY method, but the idiosyncrasies become the cracks brimming with some of our most satisfying musical ideas: these are instruments that become friendly over time, just as every instrument takes patience and understanding. Even more, the instrument is a collaboration between the visual and tactile senses, as the performer must find their way through the fibers to create sound. We also liked the idea of play, that music cannot be taken with the seriousness that some esoteric art forms demand, where the risky complexity of connecting cables on such a fuzzy instrument can almost recall a Japanese chindogu.
The Liminaphone instead is conceived as an instrument that can help the outside world speak the language of synthesizers through the use of piezo microphones and other externally connected sensors. The instrument makes it possible to explore soundscapes under various thresholds of audibility, from imperceivable to overdriven, therefore it takes its name from the Latin word “Limina”.
The inspiration for its fabric aesthetics came from an ongoing fascination with topographic maps.
Do you think you will work with textiles in the future?
We are in fact already working on our next set of instruments, that represent the development of this first phase. For these new ones, not only are we hoping to employ new textile techniques (crocheting and needle felting mainly), but also we are conducting some research in the world of e-textiles, hoping to get to a design that will allow us to manipulate the sound through an interaction with the textiles themselves. It’s another DIY scene that has grown a lot in the last decade and that has a very high creative potential! We hope that the music we are composing with all of these textile instruments will become the content of our next album release.
In general, wool has become very important to our current practice, as we have developed also a musical project in collaboration with the Icelandic musician Hafdís Bjarnadóttir. For our “Sheep Music” project, we will be performing for an audience composed not only of people but of beautiful sheep too. We will be touring it in summer 2021, including also a series of knitting workshop led by Hafdís, and we hope to reach many fun wool communities in various countries along the way!
Residencies seem to be a large part of your artistic practice. Are there still happening during Covid?
The situation is certainly complicated. We had to postpone some of our residencies too, mainly due to international travel policies, and the ones that currently have open applications seem to be quite flexible in terms of scheduling. Some residencies have artists stuck and having extended their stay since the lockdown, while others prefer to dedicate this period to hosting domestic artists or even attempting to put in place “virtual residencies“.
Is there anything you would like to add?
We are looking forward to continue the discovery in the textile world, and we are happy to receive any tips related to any aspect of it! We’re also always looking for opportunities for collaboration too, so please reach out to us about anything at all.