Francisco Lopez
Francisco Lopez
Lopez is an enigmatic presence on the experimental music scene: the first thing that strikes is his utter dedication to the purity of sound, the next that he chooses to express this purity by working with extremely complex and un-pure sounds: field recordings of forest and factory, sampled black metal. Live, the results are both ominous and serene, presenting deliberately blurred droning, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
ReadOver the last twenty years Francisco López has been developing a powerful and consistent world of minimal electroacoustic soundscapes, “trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrete music”. Through what he once called as “the exploration of the universe of broad-band noise from the real world”, his music arises from the processing of environmental recordings. In deep contrast to the classical soundscape movement (and even despite his paradoxical past involment with related organizations as the Environmental Tape Exchange, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the Nature Sounds Society), his vast activity doing field recordings all over the world (nearly 40 countries in five continents) never pursued a documentary or representational goal, but a dramatically opposite object sonore perspective. And in this sense, the evolution of his aesthetics and conceptual background is a profound process of refinement towards an extreme musical purism, with a voluntary and forceful refusal of any visual, procedural, relational, semantic, functional or virtuosistic elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerful musical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadful abysms of crude strengthness and the most subtle and diffuse aural edges; a complex territory of anti fast-listening where perceptual awareness and the power of naked music are strikingly rediscovered; a world where things are uneasy, unclear, unsolved and where one is forced to inmerse and search. He calls it belle confusion.
We started documenting our events in 2003 so unfortunately there is no video or audio documentation of this performance. If you have a bootleg or any photos you’d like to share with us, we would love to see them: get in touch with us here.