Or presents the new compact disc from Francisco López - his style is what he himself calls 'absolute concrète music'
A new deep immersion in the confusing and gigantic sound universe of the master of the subtle and the intense. Layer upon layer, building up a transcendental listening experience, unclear and unsolved.
[The CD was mastered at Roel Meelkop's studio in Rotterdam.]
Over the last eighteen years Francisco López has been developing a powerful and consistent world of minimal electro-acoustic soundscapes, 'trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrète music'. To date, his prolific catalogue comprises more than 90 sound works, which have been released by over 50 record labels from Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, UK, Italy, Poland, Austria, Canada and USA. He has toured extensively through Europe and America doing acousmatic performances, and he has received commissions from a number of reknowned institutions and organizations, such as the Dutch and Spanish National Radios, the Goethe Institute, V2 Organization, Yale University Theater and the Ralph Lemon Company.
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 involvement 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 30 countries in four continents) never pursued a documentary or representational goal, but a dramatically opposite object of sound 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 virtuosic elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerful musical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadful abysm of crude strength 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 immerse and search. He calls it "Belle Confusion".
The Wire [Sept. 2000] writes in A feature:
"Dramatic and elegant, ominous and serene, his compositions abound with sonic subtlety and intricacy, exploring the extremes of aural perception. They unfold slowly and cinematically, fading, dissolving, and montaging slabs of sound that rumble and rasp, buzz and hiss, grate and whir. Untitled # 89 (Or), for instance, begins in silence and gradually becomes a maelstrom of metallic or insectile hums that pulse and swirl, albeit just within earshot."
What others have said about his work:
- 'The most intense and elementary ambient work I've ever heard' (Scientifica Intercosmo, Germany)
- 'A truly (awe-)inspiring experience of boundless sonic depth' (Experimental Musical Instruments, USA)
- 'The complete vanishing of any comfortability; an existential thread' (ZAP, Germany)
- 'Neither ambient nor isolationism, this music goes far beyond that' (Self, Spain)
- 'Only suitable for music explorers' (Música Global, Spain)
- 'The new loverboy of intelligent noisists' (Vital, The Netherlands)
- 'He makes you find the music, and rewards you well with rich and utterly unique sound once you do' (Intransitive, USA)
- 'Iconoclastic and lucid' (Dude, Spain)
- 'He sharpens both the perception of space and the sense of hearing' (Karbon, Switzerland)
- 'López is playing on the keyboard of silence' (Bad Alchemy, USA)
- 'This donisis will change your
view on what music could be' (Drone, Germany)