Francisco López

Over the last twenty years Francisco López has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. One of the leading figures of the international experimental underground, he has realized concerts and sound installations all over Europe and the Americas,and his work has been released by more than fifty record companies through out the world.

absolute concrete music

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 conrete music'. To date, his prolific catalog comprises more than 90 sound works, which have been releasedby 50 record labels from Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, UK,Italy, Poland, Austria, Canada and USA. He has toured extensively throughEurope and America doing acousmatic performances, and he has receivedcommissions from a number of reknown institutions and organizations,such as the Dutch and Spanish National Radios, the Goethe Institut,V2 Organization, Yale University Theater and the Ralph Lemon Company.Through what he once called as 'the exploration of the universe of broad-bandnoise from the real world', his music arises from the processing ofenvironmental recordings. In deep contrast to the classical soundscapemovement (and even despite his paradoxical past involment with relatedorganizations as the Environmental Tape Exchange, the World Forum forAcoustic Ecology and the Nature Sounds Society), his vast activity doingfield recordings all over the world (nearly 30 countries in four continents)never pursued a documentary or representational goal, but a dramaticallyopposite object sonore perspective. And in this sense, the evolutionof his aesthetics and conceptual background is a profound process ofrefinement towards an extreme musical purism, with a voluntary and forcefulrefusal of any visual, procedural, relational, semantic, functionalor virtuosistic elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerfulmusical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadfulabysms of crude strengthness and the most subtle and diffuse aural edges;a complex territory of anti fast-listening where perceptual awarenessand the power of naked music are strikingly rediscovered; a world wherethings are uneasy, unclear, unsolved and where one is forced to inmerseand search. He calls it belle confusion.

( Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios)