Interview with Frank Sinutre

Frank Sinutre is an electronic project born in october 2011 in Mantova (Italy) that uses home made electronic instruments and traditional instruments (guitars, bass, vocal, vocoder). They play homemade electronic instruments such as Reactabox (a midi controller inspired by the famous Reactable™)and Drummabox (an acoustic drum machine based on Arduino). These instruments have been developed and realized in our Studio based in Mantova..

RadioActive:  How did it all start for you?

Frank Sinutre: Frank Sinutre's project starts in 2011 in a country house in the north of Italy. At that time we usually played with other bands. In november Anna Volpi, an italian theatre director, asked us to realize the soundtrack of “La Colpa della Leonessa”. This work was included in the “Festival de Teatro Social de Valencia” in Spain. After many hours of studio recording, we started to play in several live gigs near our town, then more and more far away from here. From the beginning our live equipment included some home made electronic instruments, such as Reactabox (a midi controller inspired by the famous Reactable™: it consists of a cube of light that works with an infrared webcam which works by reading images on little cubes and discs controllers that are placed and moved on the reactabox screen) and Drummabox (an acoustic drum machine based on Arduino).

RadioActive: Where have you performed?

Frank Sinutre: During these 6 years we performed live shows in about 250 live gigs, all over Italy, Swiss and Slovenia in the most popular cities like Rome, Milan, Zurich, Turin, Bologna, Ljubjana, Genua… We played in several live situations: festivals, dancefloors, discos, video installations, pubs, theatres, museums, art exhibitions, body painting performances, electronic music stages, books and comics presentations.

RadioActive: What are your favorite and least favorite venues?

Frank Sinutre: We have a lot of beautiful memories about our concerts. Each one was special in its own way. The worst live show has something special too. We love the remind of our live gigs just for the pleasure of it. During these years we met a lot of interesting people working around the world of music. Maybe the best venue of our last tour was in Bologna, both Cassero and Labas because of their great audience.

RadioActive: Do you have any upcoming shows?

Frank Sinutre: Yes, these are our upcoming gigs:
Birreria al Filò – Crevalcore (BO) – 26 luglio 2017
KW Summer – Serre dei Giardini Margherita – Bologna (BO) – 27 luglio 2017
Revolver – Genova (GE) – 28 luglio 2017
Castello della Musica – Noceto (PR) – 29 luglio 2017
BF7 Birra Festival (Siebter Himmel BrewPub e Birrificio Settimo) – Carnago (VA) – 30 luglio 2017
Bar Paganini – Rovereto (TN) – 16 agosto 2017
Gala Hala – Lubiana (Slovenia) – 17 agosto 2017
Lutkovno Gledalisce – Maribor (Slovenia) – 18 luglio 2017- Maribor (Slovenia) – 18 luglio 2017
Fuori Porta “La K” –  Cappella di Casalmaggiore (CR) – 23 agosto 2017
Rock ‘n’ Rollo – Sermide (MN) – 26 agosto 2017
Arci Volontè – Campitello (MN) – 27 agosto 2017
Bookique – Trento (TN) – 8 settembre 2017

RadioActive: Could you briefly describe the music-making process?

Frank Sinutre: We usually do everything in our house: from the music writing, to the recording and the mixing processes. Home recording is much more confortable and you can also go back to the tracks anytime to edit them.

RadioActive: What are your rehearsals generally like? Do you have a set time each week in which you practice or are rehearsals more spontaneous?

Frank Sinutre: Generally we do rehearsals of our track list before live gigs, but when we don't have to perform in the early future, we like to play something new in our free time, maybe for the next track list or for the next album. Since we use home made instruments, they require a lot of tests to set them in the best way: for example reactabox has some problems with the light sources. In the past our focus was pointed on  reactabox's performances to solve the issues.

RadioActive: What has been your biggest challenge as a project? Have you been able to overcome that challenge? If so, how?

Frank Sinutre: In our opinion three album could be a good target, but the biggest challenge we accepted was in May 2017 when we reached a crowd-funding target for the realization of the third reactabox (Reactabox-3 a new midi experience), obtaining a result of 109% on Musicraiser.

RadioActive: How do you handle mistakes during a performance?

Frank Sinutre: We always pretend that everything is going like we expected and sometimes we blame our techinical equipment ;-)… “So guys it's not our fault, it's reactabox that has some troubles with the lights”, that by the way, most times it's true!

RadioActive:  What do you usually start with when preparing for a set?

Frank Sinutre: Many many things: from keeping in touch with the art directors by getting info about the venue, through the promotion of events on social networks and web pages, we organize reharsals and our trip to the location. We also get information about the equipment such as audio speakers. Then the day we must play arrives: this is always (or it must be) somehow, an interesting and stimulating day.

RadioActive: How important is building a real relationship with the music you're playing for your own approach? There's so much music out there, is it even possible to build meaningful long-term relationships with a particular track or album?

Frank Sinutre: All songs bring us special memories. These memories belong to the past and each song can be the soundtrack of periods and moments of our life. They are an invisible thread through many years.

RadioActive:  What single night out has been the most memorable for you? As a DJ? As an attendee?

Frank Sinutre: One of the most beautiful thing of playing music is that you can travel a lot. When we travel we meet new people and discover new places. Each time we come back less poor: we learned a lot from other musical realities. As attendees we can put in our top-5 concerts Bonobo, Moderat, Raiohead, Tv on the Radio and Franz Ferdinand (not sure about the order). As musicians (we are actually not Djs 🙂 ) we liked our mini tour in Slovenia because slovenians seem to have a great interest in music. In Rome, Bologna and in the South of Italy we had a nice staying because of the local ospitality.

RadioActive: What is one sub genre you think doesn't get the attention it deserves?

Frank Sinutre: We think that sub genres are important for tags on web to direct the listeners, but they don't mean so much. Music is like the center of a circle: it doesn't matter from which way you enter inside it. It matters that you arrive at the center of the circle.

RadioActive: Outside of music, what are some of your other interests?

Frank Sinutre: We love listening to new music and going to concerts. We also like movies (David Lynch, Spike Lee, Nanni Moretti, Paolo Sorrentino are among our favourites filmmakers) and we play a lot of board games in our free time with our friends in the house where we play and record. This house had and has nowadays an important role in our personal history. Besides this, Isi Pavanelli is father of a wonderful 12 years old girl, he is a lab engineer and he is the reactabox and acoustic drummabox's developer and maker; Michele K. Menghinez is a school teacher, musician and writer.