Re: [microsound] francisco lopez

[Harvey Thornburg <harv23@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Philip Sherburne wrote:
> Having had the privilege to see Francisco Lopez perform live in
> Barcelona last week, in one of the most sublime performances I've ever
> seen, I'm now compelled to seek out some of his material.  My question
> is a fairly obvious one:  what to get?

When I saw Lopez live (last year in a tiny studio/warehouse in Santa Cruz)
the performance was exceptional as you describe.  We were all blindfolded
and got completely lost in the sound (the "belle confusion" experience).  
The volume oscillated between extremes.  At several points it
went extremely loud then cut off. I own only a few cd's but it
sounded like he was remixing from "Untitled Music for Geography", 
which has also these great dynamic shifts.  Though 
"Warszawa Restaurant" (highly recommended) has very low volume, and
"Untitled 91" is subliminal :).

> I'd avoided his recordings, actually, understanding them all to be
> virtually inaudible.  A lovely concept, I thought, but I already have a
> few discs of RLW that do the same thing; did I need more?

RLW's recent stuff is structured about "gestures" and "events", 
whereas Lopez usually deals with "clouds" or "masses" of sound, 
developed I would guess from extreme processing of broadband sources
(insects, city recordings, etc.) With Lopez the buildup from silence 
is so gradual that you can never tell precisely where the sound has 
separated from the real/imagined sounds in the environment. RLW's
methodology seems totally deliberate and precise.

They give a similar experience only in that you need to shut out visual
stimuli etc. to get a full appreciation. 

> His live performance, however, was much, much more (a slow, steady
> intensification from tape-hiss to airplane-engine-roar), and so I'm
ready to
> check out the recorded work.  Any recommendations?  The only thing I
> currently own is his field recordings of the rainforest.

La Selva is very different. If you like how he presents the field
recordings you'd probably like Chris Watson's stuff from a few years
back.

--Harvey


--Boundary_(ID_i9iOtFof5F6pd5BJbBR6lQ)
Content-Type: message/rfc822; Name="Re: [microsound] francisco lopez"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit