BASS CLARINET, PERCUSSION, PIANO & SAMPLER, E-GUITAR, ELECTRONICS
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 a new piece 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 through Portugal I was recording the train that started in Coimbra station when a woman sitting near me started this talk. She was speaking to a close friend through the mobile phone. I was involved in a drama. 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. Richard Sennett refers to the tyranny of intimacy to describe the changes during the 19th Century of public and private life. Freedom and individuality as symbolic power becomes more and more important. The emergence of the Internet and Media has possibly increased this phenomenon. This can be observed in mainstream television programs like Big Brother: it abolishes the frontiers between private and public space, bringing trivial dally life and intimacy into the public space. One of the most interesting phenomena as a case study is the YouTube "most seen" videos: daily situations turned into mass phenomena, banality feeding voyeurism.
All these aspects of the "real" bring up a challenge when confronted with abstract sound sources. The idea of Caffeine is to work with instrumental and electronic resynthesis of these sounds: YouTube-Videos, daily casual recordings, field recordings. The resynthesis is a method I have been using to transcribe and create an interpretation of sounds. These objets trouvés are analyzed and transformed into instrumental or electronic music. In Caffeine these sounds are also used due to their semantic content.