Sundown Caffeine

Rockin' the World from Its Sleep
(as told by MRD)

Our story is simple and quite often told. We are four musically-obsessed friends who go way back since high school, from a small obscure Philippine island called “Cebu”. We later parted ways for college and were sucked into the ordinary world, pursuing ordinary lives. It’s been nine years since then. Now, I'm in Manila studying law, Daxdu just passed the bar exams, Jarm is an engineer in Leyte and Yanix is a banker in Cebu. All this time, we practically lived in different worlds and were too caught up with trying to pursue the usual career paths imposed upon our educated and underpaid Filipino contemporaries.

Still, deep inside our very beings, the music was calling and the passion could not be stayed for much longer. Things were about to change.

Individually, we have done many projects and have played with many different groups but we never did music together until 2004. This was the time when Yanix came Manila to visit his sister. We had a chance to hang out at my place and I showed him a few songs I had written during the past year. We fixed one of these songs up, added a drum track and history was made. The song "Sunflowers and Dust" had become our very first single.

That same night, we wrote a new song together based on one of Yanix's sound experiments back home. It took us two hours to finish the lyrics, the melody and the bootleg recording of our second song “Hear You Coming”. The result made us conscious of the remarkable tonal chemistry that we never knew we had. Back then, my gut told me that this was only the beginning.

When I got back to Cebu for our semestral break, I met up with Yanix and Daxdu and we got into a long conversation about “sucky lives” and abandoned dreams. A few beers and a couple of coffee cups later, we decided to form a band. We rushed to the cheapest recording studio in town and started setting our material to stone. It was all good. But after hours of listening to ourselves, it dawned on us that a three-piece was just too hollow for the kind of music we were trying to make. Something was missing. Like I said back then, "We have the meat. Now we need the spice".

And the spice I had in mind was in the person of a local guitar god and an old friend. In November of 2005, we called up Jarm to join the troupe. We invited him for dinner at a local Mexican bar, offered him some beer without ever telling him of what the meeting was for. It was like one of those mafia sit-downs where you just had to keep things hanging up until the very last minute. Then, I took out my old palm pilot and had him listen to our material. After one song… silence. And finally, we popped the question: “How would you like to join us in a band? It’ll be awesome.” Silence. Turns out, Jarm has been thinking about the same thing for quite some time. He could not have been more excited. The covenant was made and on that same night, we rushed back into the studio and found and perfected the sound formula that had eluded us for too long.

That night, we became a band.

The hard part was coming up with a band name. We would collectively come up with the name describing the strong cafe culture in the Philippines and how people drank coffee during the evenings, not because they needed to stay awake but because they wanted to. Same thing goes for our music. We do it not because it's necessary but because it's a shared passion that never seems to leave us alone until we're put to the ground. Hence, we came up with "Sundown Caffeine".

We answered the call and have never looked back since then.

To date, we have 28 original compositions and are currently trying to negotiate for a possible international release of our first album.