It was during our tour through South America that we were introduced to the Chilean expression “circo pobre”, a phrase that refers to a situation in which you might need to fill the shoes of presenter, tamer, and trapeze artist all at once in order to finish the show. The phrase immediately spoke to our independent spirit: from making our own instruments to presenting the music itself, taking a self-reliant path has guided many of our artistic decisions.
The centerpiece of Circo Pobre is the Chromaplane, a new electronic instrument we’ve created over the past year. With a pickup coil in each hand, we trace shapes above the instrument’s flat surface to unveil its hidden landscape of oscillators buzzing in the electromagnetic field. We first travelled with this new instrument in Tunisia, where we shaped the four long tracks that became this album, defined by taking both a temporal and spatial approach to the music.
Since then, these compositions have been traveling alongside us: filling the corners of Gampa Gallery in Pardubice where we recorded it, bouncing off the walls of The Watermill Center where we filmed it, and overall becoming older with us as we toured throughout a good part of the Americas.
Our albums are usually conceived of as studio works first, but here we decided to include a live recording too, captured on April 16th, 2022 in the Paracas National Reserve in Peru, after an epic drive with Henri (El Paradero Cultural) and his Volkswagen van, fresh after a night of camping on the beach.
crédits
paraît le 15 juillet 2022
Circo Pobre was written at Dar Meso in Tunis (TN), recorded at Gampa Gallery in Pardubice (CZ), and filmed at The Watermill Center in New York (US).
Music, artwork, and instrument design by Passepartout Duo:
Nicoletta Favari (keyboards & electronics)
Christopher Salvito (percussion & electronics)
Special thanks to our friends at the Ciudad Abierta for the title inspiration, and to Henri Quispe for making the live recording possible.
