House Concerts

An ongoing project to present new music to local communities

Currently in its third iteration, Passepartout Duo has been developing a project to present local house concerts in the locations they reside.

The first two versions of the project took place in Ólafsfjördur, Iceland and Rauma, Finland. In both cases, the duo wrote about 20 minutes of new music based on their experience in the locations that focused on highly portable instrumentations. Then, a call for homes was sent out through the local papers and the artist residency that allowed the community to opt in. Some 17 concerts were played between the two locations ranging from Christmas holiday parties to just one on one meetings.

During Christmas in 2018, when the project took place in Finland, a second element was added to the project: some of the hosts received Sound Envelopes from our concurrent project.

In June 2019, the most recent iteration took place in Chongqing, China. This time, the duo created a “live sound installation” that could be heard through headphones. This meant that there was only one concert attendee at a time, and that others in the space wouldn’t know what the music was like until it was their turn to listen. In this case, the spaces happened to be more public (from a student dormitory’s common room to the neighborhood ‘s cultural office), and the visits were concentrated in one day. The performance piece also involved amplifying the sounds of the room and the city near the performance, so that the person listening could hear very clearly the ambient city sounds around them, as well as the sounds of the people near them in the room. The project’s goal was to create a better awareness of the sounds of Chongqing, and the divisions between public and private space.