Francisco Lopez has made a name for himself via his unique manipulations of field recordings, retaining their organic heart, yet processing them to a point where their origin is unintelligible. This approach to sound art has guided him through 200 or so releases over the last 30 years on labels like Alien8, Baskuru, Mego and Sub Rosa. His ‘live’ shows are an incredible sonic experience for the audience, who are blindfolded, seated in the dark and surrounded by speakers as Lopez manipulates the senses, playing with silence and barely discernible sound as well as abrupt shifts in dynamics. For Lopez, it’s about the intensity of sound, be it whisper quiet, sound that barely registers its presence, or great large booming drones imbued with a sense of carnage and violence. And how he moves between these extremes is fascinating.
His releases, many of which are untitled are universally uncompromising feats of sound art experimentation are tightly controlled, offering few immediate handles to draw the listener in. That’s perhaps why this release is so interesting, as aside from the audio cd, there’s an accompanying DVD. But don’t get too excited, Lopez approaches vision in a similar way that he composes sound. So the DVD component is somewhat of a misnomer and particularly on the second piece, we’re literally left in the dark.
For Kollt he’s gone out and got himself a death metal band, though he’s approached it not so much musically (though there are some very strong musical elements), but as sound pieces. Thus we get heavy riffing and pummelling drums that build to crescendos before doing that abrupt sound art cut. This music is heavy though, frantic, and when on the DVD he merges it with a narrow band of frantic ants it feels like they belong together. This builds in intensity becoming a roaring wall of noise and the narrow band is replaced by a full screen of animated ants, and it still feels right. It’s because the relationship is the speed of the ants’ movements with the speed and intensity of the music. Though later when the ants start to move into what feels like choreographed routines it all takes on a peculiar circus feel. Like Lopez has trained the ants to do his bidding, and he is mocking them by applying this overly serious heavy loud music. These connections quickly disappear as the screen fills up with ants and it starts to take on dark horror movie type connotations. That’s the beauty of this DVD as the image or the sound changes so to do the connotations.
The second piece Kulu is frustrating, punctuated by extended silences, the pieces build, utilising the same material after each silence, in not simply complexity but density and intensity as well, becoming more and more industrial and percussive as it progresses. It’s almost a lesson in how Lopez puts his music together. Kulu is apparently an Aboriginal term for seed, and the track is so named due to its evolution of a series of sound seeds or segments. One element evolved from a thirty second sound source, another from a one second piece, the other from a three second sample. There’s short version on the audio cd at 38 minutes, whilst the DVD contains a longer version at over 56 minutes. Whilst there are a series of jolting Mickey Mouse’d moments of intensity, where the music is effectively locked in with the images, particularly during the aforementioned stabs of audio violence after a seeming eternity of silence, the relationship between the sound and vision is quite frustratingly abstract. With four screens illuminated in the dark, images are often as difficult to discern as Lopez’s music, and they appear and disappear with new images seemingly at random. If it wasn’t for those Mickey Mouse moments, you’d swear there was no relationship at all.
Whilst Kollt is the infinitely more satisfying of the two pieces, thanks to the almost industrial hardcore intensity he has developed the death metal band into, as well as those intense frantic ants, the result is somewhere between video art and sound art. It’s also like nothing else, intense to the point of psychological breakdown. It’s raw and visceral and immediate, a real assault on the senses. Kulu meanwhile is perhaps more traditional Lopez, with draughty drones and much more overt and complex sound art techniques.
Bob Baker Fish
