An author in crisis seeks inspiration by jumping from fragment to fragment of sound. Raptures, despairs and asyncopated rhythms. A long song by Javier Corcobado, full of ruptures and winks, is visually reinterpreted by Carlos TMori from his experience in the plastic art of noise, his research into the domestic and the unregulated audiovisual. A lengthy and uneven transit, originally recorded on home video twenty years earlier, in which everything from school dances and neighbourhood parties to collective drifts behind a handkerchief appear.

Within Javier Corcobado's unfinished project, Canción de amor de un día (CADUD) – a 24-hour song composed of many songs by different authors and accompanied by their corresponding videos – , we find La gota de anís as Track 43. A long project, condensed in this track, which began with the constant repetition of a sound fragment on a CD after a drop of aniseed had accidentally fallen on its surface. From the idea of a love song that would last 24 hours, Javier Corcobado wrote a novel that would last 24 hours. He wrote a novel that he divided into 100 tracks.

Each fragment had a literary guideline that he gave to different authors to compose and interpret, the rest is history. In the case of La gota de anís the guideline was: "Review of the repertoire on an exercise bike. The drops of sweat run down my face, like fleeting rivers that flow into the abyss"; for this video the word "static" was chosen.

An imperceptible drop on a smooth surface radiates different wave trajectories. As a kind of creative exorcism, different mental and physical places are traversed and improvised, and two types of opposing actions – dancing and walking – are condensed and expanded into orbits of daydreams. The rapture of the school dance gives way to a sordid and absorbed walk through the periphery, fugitive lights, bubbling dark liquid, ephemeral sensations, abrupt gestures, the image retracting transformed into other presences of the same dance. Although the starting images are analogue and domestic, the electronic noises are digitally reinterpreted – drops, tremors, signal failures, colorisations, etc. – , relying on different states of self-absorption and crisis.

Technical deficiencies provoked to embody frustrations in the face of unforeseen failures in sound and visual reproduction. Disparate moments in which contemplation and boredom coincide with additive processes and displacements that shape discord and veil meaning. Obscured distortions and disharmonies, of familiar memories and uncomfortable situations, which unfold before the spectator through confusions, bewilderments and disillusionments. A playful seduction in a shady context.

Manuel Villamediana Bayón