130 Coffee Beats

For our 130th anniversary, we sampled the coffee ritual.

And transformed it into music.

There’s a whole universe of sounds associated with the coffee experience. For this anniversary, the challenge we faced wasn't to celebrate it, but to listen to it for the first time.

This was the spark that ignited 130 Coffee Beats: an artistic experiment with the talented Davide Dileo (in art Boosta) to identify the score hidden in these sounds, sampling them and transforming them into a refined and atmospheric musical composition..

130 years. 130 beats.

One hundred and thirty. It’s a number that measures more than our history.

Since 1895, Lavazza has had its sights set on the future in a continuous intertwining of knowledge, art, expertise, innovation and experimentation.

So to mark our 130th anniversary, we’ve decided not to look back, but to give our future a pulsing beat. The heart of the project is a musical track with a tempo of 130 beats per minute: one beat for every year in our history and a cadence that punctuates our ongoing drive for innovation, harnessing our heritage to the relentless pursuit of the new.

The artist

To give shape to such an ambitious idea, we needed an artist with a real vocation for experimentation, someone capable of hearing the music hidden in the material. Our choice was the multi-faceted personality, and proud Turin native, Davide "Boosta" Dileo, whose creative journey is an ongoing exploration of new sound languages.

A classically trained pianist, composer, producer and co-founder of Subsonica, his work ranges from electronic music to writing, from teaching at the Como Conservatory to composing important soundtracks.

For 130 Coffee Beats, his task wasn’t ‘simply’ to compose another soundtrack, but to set a fascinating alchemical process in motion. Boosta weaves a hypnotic dialogue between the harmonic depth of a piano and the beating heart of a historic coffee machine. The result is a sophisticated track in which the authentic sounds and components of the coffee ritual – from beans to cups and from capsules to steam – become part of the music, creating a unique listening experience.

Officina Maltoni

At the core of this sound exploration is an unusual instrument: a vintage coffee machine – and a masterpiece of engineering and design – selected at Officina Maltoni, founded in 1988 in Novafeltria (Rimini) by Enrico Maltoni. Over the years, Officina Maltoni has become a leading international player in the restoration and sale of espresso machines produced for Italian coffee bars between 1900 and 1960. It has consolidated this role in various ways, not least its valuable historical archive and its contribution to the creation in 2012 of MUMAC (the Coffee Machine Museum), turning it into the historical memory of an art that continues to inspire.

In the studio with Boosta

For four generations, we’ve firmly believed that innovation is the most authentic and courageous form of tradition. “130 Coffee Beats” is the musical expression of this philosophy and of the need to continue to explore new frontiers of taste, creativity and experience. It restates our desire to continue shaping the future of coffee, with the same passion as always and the same untiring appetite for the future. A commitment that we renew sip by sip, beat by beat.

The performance