‘WARNING: Due to the extreme subtlety of these recordings, virtually all of the audio content is completely inaudible through laptop or equivalent small speakers. Quality speakers or headphones—as well as a very quiet surrounding environment—are highly recommended for ideal listening.’ (Presque Tout, 2014, liner notes)
Since his earliest releases three decades ago, a good hundred others have flowed from various sources bearing Francisco López‘s name—testament to the enduring force of a take on the field recording/found sound lowercase/drone tradition he contributed significantly to establishing. A new wave of dark-ambient-droners are only just catching up on this authentically avant voice, a constant challenge to listeners at the threshold of perception. With processing of organic and synthetic sound sources ranging from pensive to painful, and all points extreme between, this intrepid sonic cartographer has mapped a zone of auscultation replete with arcane, liminal and buried pleasures, out of categorical bounds between industrial, sound art, and wilderness sound environments. López proposes a transcendental deep listening of/to the world, forsaking the ecstasy of communication for other sensory and spiritual gnoses. Said to be capable of ‘shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power,’ it’s more the former limits that Presque Tout (Quiet Pieces: 1993-2013) treats, title, ‘almost all,’ aligning it with Luc Ferrari’s landmark, Presque Rien (‘almost nothing’).
In sheer scope, it’s already intimidating enough—a data DVD of wave files of works compiled from many OOP editions spanning 20 sonic years along with a new 3-hour work, making seven whole hours—before even considering the extreme lowercase nature of its content. Heed the ‘health warning’ (above) to prevent audio uncertainty: deep listening muscle needs to be well toned for ears to do it justice, as sounds tend to blend/bleed into ambient space/scape— the ear needing to strain to detect detail inaudible to the naked ear. Chronologically, the earlier pieces are the sparsest, and perhaps the most challenging. The opening “El Dia Anterior a la Emergencia de los Adultos de Magicicada” is essentially 15 minutes of low frequency hum. “Untitled #78” is similarly evacuated, like an empty room being sat in, and “untitled #87” is as minimal as Being can get in a flirtation with Nothingness. “Untitled #86,” “untitled #118” and their like host audible elements that are more in line with his nature-based works (cf. La Selva); the former has an inner organic life of upper pitches–possibly remote bird chirp, the latter a distant swarm of something wild whose remotion serves to heighten its ineffability. The more recent works here tend to be less organic and relatively more assertive. Some—cf. “untitled #129” and “Untitled #216″—are so sub- they’re not so much heard as felt—a discreet eardrum pressure, a tinnitus—the former possessed of a surprisingly conventionally articulated kinetic rattle. “Untitled #309” is largely an industrial din whose oppressive menace makes it seem positively loud. The closing “Untitled #313” is truly a listening endurance test wrapped inside an epic closure, drawing on personal experiences listening to the nightscape on the city’s borderlands–distant traffic, perhaps, or subterranean machinery. An hour of predominantly slow bass creep, followed by an indeterminate passage striated with chirping synthetics, beyond which is a hic sunt leones of more distorted digital incursions.
The Urheimat of López’s sounds is imponderable—but seeking it is otiose, the spirit of his work profoundly acousmatic in essence. “Untitled#78 (1997)” could be a small piece of furniture being dragged across your head’s carpeted attic. Others could be your plumbing’s hum, your radiator’s judder. Some pieces seem to cease entirely–only mute hummings softly chafing the void signal a spectral stir in the lull. In being assembled they become as if movements in an ongoing continuum of quietude. The act of perception serves as an induction into Extreme Audio, preparing the ground for later blooming into more eloquent rumble and fulsome murmur punctuated with pinspots. Last word to the man:
‘Much against a widespread current trend in sound art and the customary standard in nature recordings, I believe in the possibility of a profound, pure, ‘blind’ listening of sounds, freed (as much as possible) of procedural, contextual or intentional levels of reference. What is more important, I conceive this as an ideal form of transcendental listening that doesn’t denies all what is outside the sounds but explores and affirms all what is inside them. This purist, absolute conception is an attempt at fighting against the dissipation of this inner world.’ (Environmental sound matter, López, 1998)
Presque Tout (Quiet Pieces: 1993-2013) is available on Line.
