Coffee 2025
Goofy, edited by Achille Filipponi, Vittoria de Franchis
Coffee 2025 is the first album by Goofy, a music project developed from songs written in 2025 for performances and video works of Ivan Cheng. An artist primarily concerned with interpretation, compression, and circulation, Ivan has worked with regular collaborator and 33 bandmate Alexander Iezzi on the production of the album.
For more than a decade, Cheng has developed a practice as intermedia as it is interpersonal. Spanning performance, writing, video, sound, and installation, his work is shaped by collaboration, letting transactions, and encounters inform both method and material. Iezzi’s work is similarly genre agnostic, finding consistent outputs in installation and music.
At the centre of Coffee 2025 is Cheng’s elastic and expressive voice. Presented without processing, his vocal takes are intimate against a persistent electronic landscape. Even with the endless possibilities of the recording studio, Cheng’s approach remains resolutely ‘live’, rarely layering his voice, and keeping language intelligible. The difference between these recorded versions and the originals intended for live performance are the freedom in density. Iezzi’s glitching and tightly wound digital artifacts ricochet across simple and elegant presets, flirting through genre with drum programming.
Lyrically driven, the songs were originally composed by Cheng to be functional, temporary or disposable: music to fill time, punctuate monologues or structure participation in camera-mediated performance. The songs were thus a tool — a way of shifting the audience’s mode of listening, moving them in and out of estrangement — as well as a site for pleasure. Reconsidered through the format of the record, Coffee 2025 leans towards the idiom of pop, begging for a relisten.
Goofy asks what provenance has to do with eventual use, within a culture of accelerated citation and recombination. Goofy is also two friends having fun with materials abstracted from the original.
Coffee 2025 is released on vinyl as part of a series of co-publications of Axis Axis and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Curated by Vittoria de Franchis, they exist as editorial experiments centred on sound, language, and documentation of performances or works by artists who have been exhibited in the Foundation’s spaces. The release stems from Ivan Cheng’s solo exhibition, Serial Surrogates (Absolutely USB), at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London in 2025.
12" vinyl
140gr
First edition
300 copies
Graphic design
Giandomenico Carpentieri
Co-published with the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation
Coffee 2025
Goofy, edited by Achille Filipponi, Vittoria de Franchis
Coffee 2025 is the first album by Goofy, a music project developed from songs written in 2025 for performances and video works of Ivan Cheng. An artist primarily concerned with interpretation, compression, and circulation, Ivan has worked with regular collaborator and 33 bandmate Alexander Iezzi on the production of the album.
For more than a decade, Cheng has developed a practice as intermedia as it is interpersonal. Spanning performance, writing, video, sound, and installation, his work is shaped by collaboration, letting transactions, and encounters inform both method and material. Iezzi’s work is similarly genre agnostic, finding consistent outputs in installation and music.
At the centre of Coffee 2025 is Cheng’s elastic and expressive voice. Presented without processing, his vocal takes are intimate against a persistent electronic landscape. Even with the endless possibilities of the recording studio, Cheng’s approach remains resolutely ‘live’, rarely layering his voice, and keeping language intelligible. The difference between these recorded versions and the originals intended for live performance are the freedom in density. Iezzi’s glitching and tightly wound digital artifacts ricochet across simple and elegant presets, flirting through genre with drum programming.
Lyrically driven, the songs were originally composed by Cheng to be functional, temporary or disposable: music to fill time, punctuate monologues or structure participation in camera-mediated performance. The songs were thus a tool — a way of shifting the audience’s mode of listening, moving them in and out of estrangement — as well as a site for pleasure. Reconsidered through the format of the record, Coffee 2025 leans towards the idiom of pop, begging for a relisten.
Goofy asks what provenance has to do with eventual use, within a culture of accelerated citation and recombination. Goofy is also two friends having fun with materials abstracted from the original.
Coffee 2025 is released on vinyl as part of a series of co-publications of Axis Axis and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Curated by Vittoria de Franchis, they exist as editorial experiments centred on sound, language, and documentation of performances or works by artists who have been exhibited in the Foundation’s spaces. The release stems from Ivan Cheng’s solo exhibition, Serial Surrogates (Absolutely USB), at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London in 2025.
12" vinyl
140gr
First edition
300 copies
Graphic design
Giandomenico Carpentieri
Co-published with the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation