According to the website biography of Luís Antunes Pena – born in Lisbon 1973 and currently living in Cologne – his compositions result from an intensive use of computer-generated structures. But this is not really what one hears: his music is much more playful than this suggests. In large part that is a consequence of his palette of sounds, which might be drawn equally from a covertly recorded telephone conversation as from any of the instruments on stage.
Like the Dane Simon Steen-Andersen or the Austrian Clemens Gadenstätter (two composers with whom he appears to have little other connection), Antunes Pena has found a liberating energy in the legacy of Helmut Lachenmann's approach to sonic production that Lachenmann himself has never quite been able to embrace. Where Lachenmann sees rubble, Antunes Pena finds revelry. (‘A movement of dead movements, of almost final quivers, the pseudo-activity of which consists of nothing more than rubble’ is the German's famous description of his Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung), a piece on which Antunes Pena has written a dissertation.) Antunes Pena's music may thus be accused of lacking seriousness or intensity, but that's not necessarily a bad thing always; and not necessarily true anyway: there are many ways to say something serious.
The album's title piece certainly explodes with a flamboyant burst of sounds: sweeps of piano strings, clacking and pinging percussion, the twang and glissando of electric guitar, some feedback and amp hiss, abrasive bass clarinet multiphonics … The players are Oslo's asamisimasa, and this is a style of music in which they are eminently comfortable – one of their first recordings was a Steen-Andersen portrait, which bristled with similarly manic energy. Yet this is not a chaotic free for all: everything is carefully placed into an angular, technicolour prosody. The details, of both writing and playing, are crucial: Antunes Pena keeps every possible sonic plate spinning at once; asamisimasa time the entries and exits of every sound with diamond-cut precision.
Woven through Caffeine, the piece, is the aforementioned phone call, apparently overheard and recorded by Antunes Pena on a Portuguese train. That phone call is electronically treated such that we only hear tiny snippets of it at a time – the words are hardly discernible; in fact it is the sleeve note that reveals their intimate content. ‘A glimpse into a private life’ and a pursuit of ‘the question of how intimate space is changing in the age of smartphones and YouTube’, says that note (written by Friederike Kenneweg). Certainly Antunes Pena's piece asks questions about public/private space; I'm not sure if they're the right ones though.
Found materials of a more neutral type are woven through the rest of Caffeine, the album. There is certainly a Dadaist edge to Antunes Pena's work, acknowledged in Anatomia de um poema sonora for soprano, male speaker, alto saxophone, piano, percussion and electronics, towards the end of which are heard lines from Kurt Schwitters’ An Anna Blume. K-U-L-T for piano and electronics stitches into its eight-minute toccata (played with untiring force by Pavlos Antoniadis) excerpts of pop, Beethoven and Mozart, as well as noise recorded from streets, industry and the sea.
Amidst this Merz-like arrangement of sonic detritus are moments of intense stillness, however, when the recordings take over and we hear just the busy hum of street or café or station. For all the music's surface hyperactivity, windows like these appear all over this album – one of the most striking is the long metallic drone that occupies more than a quarter of Anatomia – and they set any presumptions one might have about that music's range into sharp relief. The fourth movement of the suite Fragments of Noise and Blood, ‘Das Kapital Chaos’, juxtaposes a single reverberating piano chord against the loud buzz and pop of an amplifier cable; Antunes Pena calls this his ‘covert key work’, and it is striking for its multiple inversions of foreground and background, accident and intention, acoustic and electronic, beautiful and ugly. Indeed one of the most successful pieces here may be Tres quadros sobre peda (Three Paintings on Stone), written for tuned pieces of granite, percussion and electronics; much of the material of these pieces derives from sessions of improvisation and experiment with the stones undertaken with the percussionist Nuno Aroso, and the music is imbued with a calmer, more measured sense of investigation and discovery.
