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BioGRAPHY

Passepartout Duo is the musical project of Nicoletta Favari and Christopher Salvito. The group has been on a nearly continuous world tour ever since they began collaborating in 2015, performing across more than 60 countries while writing music for percussion, keyboards, and electronic instruments they design themselves.

Across their performances, the instrumentation and location change but the music persistently returns to the same ideas: delicate interlocking rhythms, minimalistic repetition, pensive melodies and the physical exchange between two performers sharing one instrument.

Their discographic releases trace different stages of this approach. Argot places the peculiar inflections of a 1970s Serge synthesizer alongside acoustic piano; Radio Yugawara (Tonal Union), made with Japanese ambient music pioneers Inoyama Land, emerged from a spontaneous improvisation session. Their 2026 project Pieces from Places gathers compositions written over several years in locations stretching from Taipei and Tokyo to Fes, Kolkata, and Tbilisi.

Their most well-known instrument is the Chromaplane, an electromagnetic synthesizer played using pickups. This instrument became the centerpiece of their live set before being developed into a commercial instrument with Berlin-based KOMA Elektronik. In 2025, it received first prize at the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. Passepartout Duo’s continuing work on the interface has since led to the Haloplane, a new electromagnetic sampler instrument.

After more than a decade on the move, Passepartout Duo has grown around a simple way of working: making music, building the tools needed to play it, and carrying both from one place to the next. What began as a practical response to life on the road has gradually become the identity of the group: two musicians developing their own instruments and their own musical language, while continuing to test both in front of audiences around the world.

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PRESS INFORMATION

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"Experimental music is too often dismissed by many as cold and calculated. Passepartout Duo are here to tear down that myth."

Chris Ingalls
PopMatters (US)

"Some of the most gorgeously sophisticated and refreshing exercises in minimalism you could hope to hear."

Joe Muggs
Bandcamp Daily (US)

"Masters of this daily art that is substantiating their own dreams"

Miryam Scandola
Pantheon Verona (IT)

"Daylighting is an album that unfolds in space, not time, and I imagine the album as a whole, frozen in time, suspended across a museum wall. The soundscapes stand there, shining, as synthesizers, percussion, and other samples build up sculptures in your ears, to consider at your leisure."

The Reykjavík Grapevine (IS)

“The music impresses on its own terms, but the duo’s inventiveness makes it all the more dazzling."

Peter Margasak
Bandcamp Daily (US)

"The music is solemn, hypnotic, ethereal, immersive, elegant, free but at the same time structured, it seems to flow with grace and authority."

Giovanni Savini
Just Baked (IT)

"A simply enjoyable, streamlined listen."

Laura Studarus
NYLON (US)