This month (well over the past couple of months really) I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Hannes Pasqualini aka “Papernoise”. We’ve got a few things “in the works” as it were but for the benefit of everyone reading I thought an
interview would be great to get an insight into how he became “the guy” for
eurorack panel design. As you’ll see, I’ve spread plenty of pictures across the next few pages so show off his brilliant design work.
So Hannes, clearly design work came first but how did you first come to work with modular synthesizer companies. Was it very much a "by chance" stumble into it through friends or were you actively aiming to work within this community?
As you say! It really was a thing that happened by chance, or better as the result of a peculiar chain of events. If you had asked me 5 years ago about getting into modulars I would have said: "no way man!" I'm not going to buy into that
money-eating habit!" (laughs). I was more interested in chiptune stuff (C64s and Game Boys), circuit bending, DIY and in building small desktop synths. Through my engagement with the chiptune community I first learned about Olivier Gillet's Shruti-1 DIY synth (the predecessor of the Shruthi, notice the lack of the "h"). I had to email Olivier a couple of times, convincing him that I had a great idea for an enclosure, until he finally sold me one of the few kits he had made. The
Shruti-1 was one of my first proper DIY projects, after the SammichSID and a couple of Atari Punk Consoles. From there I got more of his synths and started to regularly post and comment on his online forums. As a graphic designer I come from illustration and comics. I had posted some of my works on the Mutable forums and apparently Olivier was aware of them. When he got the idea to make the 4-Pole Mission Shruthi he asked me to work on a movie-poster-like promo postcard. The 4-Pole Mission was a morphing filter and the name was inspired by the movie The Thing (the Carpenter remake). From there we kept working
together on several other things: we did the Yellow Magic Shruthi, which featured an illustrated sticker and PCB graphics by me and my wife Elizabeth, various graphics for the Anushri and Ambika synths and redesigned the Mutable Instruments logo, visual identity and website (together with fellow graphic designer Patricia Plangger, who was a co-worker of mine at the time) Then, as we all know, Olivier got interested in modular synths, and developed his first 4 modules (Braids, Peaks, Grids and Edges) and since we were already working together he asked me to take care of the graphics. When he asked me if I was interested in working on something like this, I immediately said: "hell yeah!", even though I didn't even have a modular synth at home. Given that I couldn't possibly design anything for a system I didn't know much about, I borrowed a couple of modules from friends to learn more about it (Olivier also sent me a bunch of things he wasn't using at the time), my bandmate
Michele sold me his old case (which was
basically a Doepfer DIY kit and a couple of
wooden planks, held together by tape).
That was how I started my journey into
modulars.