Here’s a quote from Pierre Schaeffer: “Often surprised, often uncertain, we discover that much of what we thought we were hearing, was in reality only seen, and explained, by the context.” This is the nature of acousmatic listening; sound removed from visual context and understood for it’s own properties. From this initial insight in the 1950’s, a new way of focusing on the phenomenology of sound has been developed. Over the last 20 odd years, Francisco Lopez has striven to expand on his own particular take on these ideas, an absolute musique concrète.

If we’re thinking about audition and vision then we need to think about the effects each has on the other, where one leads the other. Like for example, on the one hand our spatial hearing is much better than our peripheral vision; on the other, what’s seen tends to override and colour what we hear. So what happens experientially when we remove one sense, and focus solely on the other? Let’s find out. Oh yeah, and as well as all of this technical stuff, Lopez is an incredible musician, capable of building performances with all the power of any noise musician you care to mention, but with a dramatic and often delicate sense of dynamics also.