Few artists make you wonder, make you so painstakingly analyse and dissect the sounds you are hearing as much as Spanish sound artist Francisco Lopez. The reason for this is his desire to utilise sounds in his compositions that feel familiar, yet are often just out of earshot, or just out of ear memory. It’s this feeling of uncertainty of never being entirely sure of what you’re hearing that is so compelling. He of course gives nothing away, each piece here is named untitled, with a number after it. All we have is the location in which he gathered his material, and the knowledge that it’s more than likely heavily processed, more often than not obscuring its original recordings.
Lopez travels the world gathering recordings from all manner of exotic locales. On this two disc 14 track collection alone he gathered sounds from the Namibian desert, the Amazon rainforest, Costa Rica, Cologne, Montreal, Latvia, Mexico and England. He is remarkably prolific, his work has been released on over 140 labels worldwide and he has collaborated with over 100 artists. Here he works with sounds from Phil Niblock and Rutger Zuydervelt of Machinefabriek amongst others, yet in the main it’s gathered mixed and manipulated by him alone.
The tunes vary dramatically. It opens with loud snoring sounds and takes in everything from unprocessed frogs to cold metallic sheets of sound. It’s part of the beauty of Lopez’ approach, you never really know what you are going to get. There are however some very Lopezian moments here. Abrupt ruptures of sound, the manipulation of silence, and the vague hint of sounds barely in earshot. There are also some almost musical, perhaps cinematic moments where he demonstrates his ability to exert and manipulate tension. Lopez purposefully merges the natural material with the animal with the industrial and back and forth until they’re all hopelessly intermeshed and it becomes a strange new form.
It’s sound developed for close listening, at times dense and challenging, at others quite beautiful and delicate. Unpredictable yet always compelling Lopez continues to demonstrate the potential for sound art to be a dynamic risk taking rewarding form.
Bob Baker Fish
