It's the end of the working day in Los Angeles, rogue nitrates cast an unreal glow to the atomic sunset and Madonna's people have made a decision : the main title music for the star's new film will be by an act from Ireland called Metisse.
The track, Boom Boom Ba, arrived just a few days earlier. A modem clicked and whirred and the music unfurled in a data stream of bits and bytes. It's luxuriant and symphonic, a coolly rendered slice of synthesised emotion, its vocal delivered in a dialect of the Ivory Coast. Madonna says she'd like to hear some more.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, at a studio buried somewhere amid the endless skyscraper totems of Eastern aspiration, the Chinese pop sensation Bondy Chiu is reading over some lyrics. They're written by Metisse and they've just been translated into Cantonese. She learns them by rote, records the track and puts it on her new album. It's just been released to a vast Asian audience.
Back in the States, the pasty-faced backroom folk of network television put the finishing touches to the new series of ER. For one scene, in which a lead character sips a pensive skinny latte in a lonesome cafe, they overdub two minutes of moody and melancholic electronica. Again, it's by Metisse.
Thanks to the zip and pizazz of technology, then, it seems that the centre of the musical universe can be wherever you're at. For Metisse, that's about 15 miles south and east of Cork city, in a small house with a view over Fountainstown beach and the slate-grey expanse of the choppy harbour.
At this time of year, the beach is mostly deserted, save for windswept couples given to wintry romance, and the occasional dog. So it's not too much of a distraction for Metisse, ensconced in their home studio, slaving over hot sequencers and expensively humming digital recording gizmos. Metisse is a two-piece, made up of Aida and Skully. She's in her late 20s, born in the Ivory Coast and brought up in France. He's in his mid30s, originally from the side of a mountain in West Cork. They met in Toulouse about five years back and they're a couple as well as a partnership.
Skully went into Gallic exile in frustration at a faltering musical career. In the 1980s, he'd been in a couple of indie bands that had almost made it, that had got within sniffing distance of lucrative contracts before fizzling out. Back then, you couldn't click on a mouse and transmit your music to the world's four corners, you had to Pay Your Dues.
This involved endless demo tapes and countless hopeful calls from wet phone boxes, playing dead end gigs in the upstairs rooms of battered pubs, lugging amps and sitting around in vans, enduring a long bean-eating penury of roll-your-own baccy and flagons of discount cider. Toulouse it was then.
Fast forward a couple of years and Aida is doing a kind of Caribbean cabaret in the nightclubs of Toulouse and one day, as she's loading a sound system into one of those vans, she's being sized up, ankles to nape, by a gangly Irishman staring goggle-eyed out the window of a nearby cafe. He'd recently taken his old keyboard out from under the bed and was doodling and experimenting. He'd heard somewhere about this singer . . .
"I knew straight away that it had to be her," he says. "So I went up and approached her and told her what I was up to. It took a few weeks of stalking her, basically, but she finally agreed to come up to the house and sing."
"The first night we played together was amazing," he goes on. "I was in one room playing keyboards and effects and stuff and Aida was wearing a radio mike and she'd gone into the kitchen to cook up all this African food she'd brought along. So she was singing and I was playing the music and there were all these smells of exotic spices filling up the house and, you know, we kind of knew we were definitely onto something."
Sparks having flown, the pair relocated to Cork. Their break came when they signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music. "They've been brilliant for us," says Skully. "They've set us up with all these contacts in LA and Hong Kong and God knows where else and with the studio in the front room, we don't even have to leave the house! We can just record something and send it out on an ISDN line. A few years ago, to record what we're able to record here, you'd have needed about ten warehouses full of equipment, but you can do just about anything now. I can walk into the kitchen and record the sound of a pepper shaker and I can manipulate that, I can give it emotion."
AIDA writes most of the lyrics which she sings, stunningly, in French and English and a couple of Ivory Coast dialects, Dioula and Agni.
"We usually record late at night," she says, "sitting in the studio looking out at the sea, with just the gas light going. It makes it so much easier for me if I have to record an intimate song. Instead of being surrounded by 30 engineers in a big studio someplace, it's just the two of us and I can really concentrate."
Living and working together, of course, can give rise to the occasional domestic. "There are rows sometimes about the music but I usually win," she says, "because if I don't like something, I won't sing it!"
Metisse's profile should rise significantly in the New Year when that Madonna film is released. Directed by the Hollywood veteran John Schlesinger, The Next Big Thing also stars Rupert Everett and the Metisse track is slated to be a single release from the soundtrack album. With US interest bubbling up to a rolling boil, the band's manager, Gerald O'Leary, says he now has two distinct working days.
"I work on the Irish and UK stuff until teatime," he says, "and then my American day starts. But you can't complain. Ten years ago, it would have taken six months of sweat to track down someone in the States, to make a contact. Now you can literally do it in seconds."
Amazing, this technology. You tap a PC keyboard in Fountainstown and in California, executive ponytails splay and bob to the sound of an emotional pepper shaker.