Caffeine

Programme Note

That's why Lady Doctor made that remark
If my girls were older I would have already left that guy.
Well, then where do I go?
Last week, I ...
So what! Have you seen the good husband she got? That one who killed himself

During the years of 2009 and 2010 I frequently had an audio recorder with me to capture sounds for the piece I was working on called I-X-Herculean. I captured sounds of traffic, machines, nature, made field recordings while traveling or just made a walk. In one of these travels I was recording the train that started in Coimbra in Portugal when a woman sitting near me started this talk. She was speaking to someone into a mobile phone. Probably, she would not have such a talk with an unknown person but the fact that she had this device in her hand created a kind of invisible room separating her from the rest of the wagon.

This made me think of the way technology transforms our relation to public and private life. It can be observed in mainstream television programs like Big Brother: these abolish the frontiers between private and public space, bringing trivial dally life and intimacy into the public space. Also, Facebook creates a mixture between public and private sphere, a new category of semi-public spaces. But one of the most interesting phenomenon is the YouTube most seen videos. The number of views are impressive: Talking twin babies: 77.308,563 views; Ultimate dog tease: 127.979.007 views; Evolution of dance: 206.964,822 views; or the incredible Charlie bit my finger - again: 508.895.035. All these videos are private videos, daily situations turned into mass phenomena.

Caffeine uses the sound of some of these videos that work like bizarre objects trouvŽs in a disjointed sound environment. The Coimbra recording is the main source of the piece. But also the instrumental writing is strongly influenced by the disparate musical material: "melodies", noises and white noise, Muzak-Chords and multiphonics, clusters, harmonic and percussive sounds.