Amek nl_27: New Valance Drakes LP for Amek
Celebrating Valance Drakes' third full-length for us and doing a show this Sunday
After a pretty chill summer with the exception of our first show in Varna for quite a few years, we open the new season with a brand new release, a show reminder, and an interview with our Italian guests Passepartout Duo. Let’s have a most ambient Fall!
New Release
Four years lay between “An Angel In Alliance With Falsehood” and “Hate Devours Its Host”, Valance Drakes’ brand new full-length for Amek Collective. This deeply personal record sets the producer on yet another path of narrative-driven musical alchemy. We watched this album grow and unfold into another showcase not just of Drakes' sound design and compositional craftsmanship but an honest representation of life as beautiful or punishing as it can get.
Order “Hate Devours Its Host” on vinyl (ltd. 100) or digital here.
Concert
Passepartout Duo (IT), Musical Statues, Dayin at Koncept Space
For the 14th event of our Sunday concert series шумна неделя, we return to Koncept Space, Sofia with the Italian electroacoustic and experimental music project Passepartout Duo and local support by Musical Statues and Dayin. Hope to see you there!
Radio
If you cannot make it to the show above, on October 1, at 10 pm CET tune in to Kanal 103 for this month’s edition of the radio iteration of шумна неделя. If you’ve missed any of our most recent shows, including the Comfort Club episodes on Black Rhino Music, we do our best to maintain an updated archive here.
The Truth Is In The Sound - An Interview with Passepartout Duo
Behind the name Passepartout Duo, we find pianist Nicoletta Favari and percussionist Christopher Salvito. Their music explores the way we listen to and connect with sound. Constantly on tour since the duo’s birth in 2015, we are glad to have them in Sofia for the first time on October 1 at Koncept Space. Here’s the English version of their interview for Lunatic.bg.
You seem to travel a lot with your music, where does this interview find you?
We’ve just landed in Nicosia, Cyprus. We’re staying here for two months to work on a lot of new ideas: some new electronic instruments, an installation, a live set, and some more recorded music.
And yes, we do travel a lot! We have been traveling for the past six years without pause, and this modality has not only directed us toward a very particular way of making music but has also become a sort of performance piece in itself.
How would you describe your music, not just to those who haven’t yet checked it but to anyone who doesn’t really follow the dynamics of electronic and experimental music?
What we like to think is that “the truth is in the sound”, so it would be just a coarse approximation to try to describe the music. It’s definitely easier to just check it out!
What we can say is that it is fully instrumental and makes use of electronic sounds from hardware instruments we build alongside acoustic instruments normally related to our backgrounds as a percussionist and a pianist. We like slowly evolving processes and intricate rhythms, and endeavor to make things that are simple at a glance but complex at a closer listen.
Because playing live is an important part of our music too, the way in which we interact as a duo also has a big role in the sound, everything we do should be a balance between two instrumentalists without a real 'solo' voice.
We can also say what we are attempting to achieve with our music right now is taking the audience on a journey with us to ‘somewhere else’ for the time of the performance.
You two have been collaborating since 2015, what kind of music were you involved in before that?
Before 2015, we were basically in school learning Western classical music, with a focus on contemporary and experimental music. Since then, we’ve met a lot of people who inspired us the right way, and so we have been consistently moving a bit away from what you might call classical.
I suppose you are classically trained. How are formal musical education and experimental techniques intertwined in your work and generally in the way you listen to music?
Considering that classical training is all we knew for many years really, it’s definitely baked into our approach as performers, but we try not to let it take over too much. For example, it’s still very important for us, as people making primarily electronic music now, to make sure that there is always a gesture and that every sound source is ‘played’ at some point. There’s also a big influence of certain forms, harmonies, and overall larger structures on our music that we think are definitely related to classical music, but at the same time, most music has these features in some capacity. One nice thing about classical training, though, is that you play a lot of other composers' music, and that gives you a really deep look inside of different minds that you don’t quite get as a listener - I think that has had a big influence too.
The longer we’re in it, the less the classical training seems to matter at all, though - we recently did a collaboration with two musicians we absolutely adore, neither of them knows how to read music, and they are both just fantastic in their own way - we don’t think classical training would have offered them anything at all.
Do you find yourselves often analyzing more than actually experiencing other people’s music?
It really depends. Analyzing really implies an active process rather than passively noticing the harmonies, forms, and production techniques people are using, which is something you can’t necessarily turn off as a musician. Sometimes people call that analyzing. Still, it’s a completely passive act and doesn’t in any way lessen the experience of listening to music. As for actively trying to break something down, I think it only happens when something feels really mysterious and completely unexplainable. Then we want to dig in deeper.
Many of the tools you are using in your creative process are hand-made, at what time did you discover what has been offered on the software/hardware market wasn’t sufficient for the sound you were aiming at creating?
Lack of supply is definitely not the main reason why we started making our own instruments.
In the beginning, what brought us to building them was a mix of chance, need, and fun. Soon enough, we realized that a piano and percussion are not the most friendly instruments when it comes to constantly traveling and performing in a variety of contexts, which is what we love to do.
So, creating things that were portable and fun to make music with was our first priority. This started out with simple acoustic percussion instruments, but when we decided it would be fun to dig into electronic instruments, a parallel universe opened to us, rich with even more interesting possibilities. Learning electronic music from the inside out has taught us so much about sound and about ourselves as performers.
Because after all, these instruments keep us company on stage, and so it matters a lot how they look and how we interact with them too.
How different is your process when creating an album and when performing live? Do you rely on improvisation when playing in front of an audience or do you stick to a predetermined structure or a score?
So far, our main live sets have been almost thoroughly composed. In the writing process, there is definitely a wider space for improvising, either to find ideas that then get developed or to find melodies that are used intact. But we have a few projects in which we are actually trying different improvisation-based approaches, so it’s definitely something that will assume a new role in the upcoming years for us. We’d try just about anything.
You have traveled a big part of the world with your music - what have been your favorite places to perform?
We recently traveled to Japan, and the entire trip was so fantastic and rewarding! We felt really connected to the audience and learned so much. We also did a four-month and a 40-concerts tour around South America, which was so much fun. Our favorite places to perform are those that make us learn a lot, and there have been too many of those to list right here.
And is there a place or a type of place you’d avoid returning to?
Well, we love going to new places, so we’re always prioritizing avoiding returning to previous ones. We’d go just about anywhere, but that said, we can’t say there’s any place we’d avoid returning to per se.
Most of your music is available on vinyl, I think only one release is digital-only. What significance does physical format have for you?
With every year passing by, the physical format has become more and more meaningful for us. It represents a way of discovering music that is an alternative to streaming or live concerts. Making a physical release involves so many extra steps and is an opportunity to think about the music in different ways. As an object, it also meets our passion for design. It has a very functional role as a means of documentation, it fossilizes something that is somewhat definitive in a more real way in comparison to the digital world. Maybe it also makes sense for the type of music that we make, listening to which might work better in settings that are intimate and personal.
Is there a scene or a circle of artists that you feel like you belong to, maybe from your city or somewhere you play live often?
Since we travel so much, it’s difficult to feel a part of a specific circle of artists. It’s not really a feeling of belonging, but we certainly feel close to the little communities of artists we meet along the way that are completely DIY and manage to sustain both a performance career and create a little welcoming nest of opportunities for fellow musicians. There seem to be communities like that in nearly every city.
Feel free to share with us some of your favorite artists.
This list is always a hard one to be comprehensive and fair, but we can mention an act that we just discovered and we’re listening to now, which is the Hosono + Takahashi duo called Sketch Show from the early 2000s.