Francisco López

Over 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 concrète music’. To date, his prolific catalog comprises more than 120 sound works, which have been released by 80 record labels from Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, UK, Italy, Poland, Austria, Norway, Greece, Canada, USA, Japan and Australia. He has toured extensively throughout Western and Eastern Europe, North, Central and South America, Japan and Australia doing acousmatic performances, and he has received commissions from a number of reknown institutions and organizations, such as the Dutch and Spanish National Radios, the Goethe Institut, V2 Organization (Rotterdam), Yale University Theater (New Haven), the Ralph Lemon Company (New York), the Zeitkratzer Ensemble (Berlin), Sound Traffic Control (san Francisco), Creative Time (New York) and Quartier Ephemere (Montreal).

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.

( Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios)