‘Field recordings are typically viewed and listened to as referential or simulative. My approach with environmental sound matter moves away from this representational perspective and explores, among other aspects, the phenomenological, the textural, and the ineffable.’ (Francisco López)
For over 30 years Francisco López has developed an unrivaled sonic universe, a retro-perspective on which was recently provided by his own Presque Tout. His is a personal creed proposing a listening of the world that is blind and transcendental, freed from imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory, and spiritual, expansion (sample here). His work falsifies dichotomies between industrial and wilderness sound environments, shifting from liminal to abyssal sonic extremes. Untitled#281 (margin note (i) López’s titular blankness is a wilful strategy to throw listeners off track in any attempt to attribute spurious significance to his sources) is based on bird calls from original recordings carried out over a 15-year period in multiple wilderness locations of Brazil, NZ, Australia, Spain, S. Africa, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru (margin note (ii) environmental recordings may suggest Murray Shafer and his acoustic ecology, but look more to Schaeffer and his musique concrète of manipulated recorded matter as sound objects in themselves).
Abandon generic preconceptions of ‘birdsong’ pieces, all who enter here! Soundmatter is subject to extreme mutation and evolution with software-and-tear in a granular synthetic squidge familiar from other late López (see WITH/IN). Such extremes, as well as the signature extended crescendi/diminuendi, and silence, well merits the now largely empty epithet ‘experimental,’ and here he warns: ‘digital clipping in this an aesthetic decision and is explicitly intentional,’ an intention pronounced throughout the first half, and consistent with the source sounds’ materiality. Far from noisy, though, the opening section is a liminal slow seep from near-nothingness into being, with disrupt coming just over halfway to a more insistent, even cacophonic, submersive ambiance, then a passage where the original bird-calls blend with the processed versions and are slowly absorbed brings it to a close. Redolent of computer clinicians of the Roel Meelkop and Marc Behrens ilk in parts, in others, with their stark contrasts of detailed textures and depth of movement, closer to the noise sculptings of a Kevin Drumm or Russell Haswell. So far, so reductive. Deep down, Untitled #281 may not be about anything—that is along lines of mystification congruent with earlier López—so much as the finding of a logical mode of juxtaposing ideas—a logic that’s revealed as it’s peeled, and peals, in episodic structures with sui generis treatments. Departing from spectral cosmic dust to chaotic collage in a slowly evolving tableau of teeming audio manipulation, a queasy drifting ambience of static drones, solar wind whoosh, click’n’crackle, and MAXed-out Sturm und Klang predominates. When fizzes, roars and crescendi suddenly cut via hard edits to drier or more muffled domains, the listener is led to meditate on noise and signal, prompting processing of the piece as if it were an orchestral work with its own internal movements, cadences and codas. Intelligent design can be seen in these curt cut-offs and sudden silences, as if the listener, seduced by Lòpez into the woods, in thrall to the sounds found therein, were not so much abandoned as ejected from dream to everyday world in an audio version of Brecht’s V-effect, the less interesting than ignorable sounds of your living space in stark contrast to the erstwhile intensity, all serving to point the meditative dislocation—both aesthetic and therapeutic—sought.
López’s aim is true, then, in building sound objects for his audience to use as a respite from form, context and language, enabling deep immersion in his largely acousmatic sonic worlds. But, overall, though good use is made of limited resources in achieving some striking transformations of sound objects, the abiding feeling left by Untitled #281 is less compelling than some of Lòpez’s earlier mysteries. A closing mention for Barcelona’s Störung platform, whose credo of alternative sound experience via ‘interference’ (= Störung [Ger.]) with established electronic music genres, promoting ‘experimentation and improvisation in the field of sound synthesis and image in real-time to create a unique audiovisual environment,’ makes it a sympathetic host for this work.
Untitled#281 is available on Störung
