Dusted Reviews Artist: Francisco Lopez Album: addy en el pais de las frutas y los chunches Label: Alien8 Review date: Apr. 17, 2003

Reissued Field Recordings of Rapture

1. Blindfolded and whipped, from a sudden cacaphony, a burst of sound, then hollowed, echoed, thinned out, transient time – down to what appears, in the ears, to be silence: but it is other, it recognises the impossibility of degree zero sound, it is a quiet pool of sparse reflection. Humming the hymns of grating surfaces.

A subsumed trickle of extended low-frequency sinewaves produce a listening experience qualitatively different in accordance with the technology in use: from headphones, the reminiscent and treated, unrepresentable higher-frequency sounds weave overtop a deafening absence of silence as the headphone cones struggle to embody the shaved precision of a bass frequency that begins to twist and turn in only occasionally audible timbres. With proper studio monitors, the bass flutters the nerves, sets afire the body and redefines the arc of sound in the room. Keyboard taps become libretto to the omnipresent monstrosity of perfection found in this bass, the windows vibrate occassionally, and I lapse into dream.

2. Bees. Swarming, incapable of numerical calculation, pulsed by a repetitive thump, dangerous, backdrop against the jungle, one swarms closer. Thud is heartbeat. Double-pump pulse, increasing in tempo. Thinning out the horizon of breath. Breathing the bees into the lungs: sudden swallow opens, the world reduces its sound to thunder and rain.

The slow entrance of the bee and the heart dance quietly over a microscopic terrain designed to entrance the listener and extend movement. Like the previous piece, the listener turns up the volume in an attempt to hear the detail. Leaning forward and poised: the listener's body – bees. Then Thunder. Thunder of the gods, even, as my studio monitors performed 4" cone-movements in the re-articulation of the jungle's response to the haunting growl of the clouds.

3. The churning of a violent water, drawn from a windswept cave to the sudden and vicious movement – in all directions – of a tidepool facing a sudden rain, monsoon, the wrath of a god or of Aguirre. The supreme anarchic beauty of fluidic destruction.

None of this is represented in sound. The sounds are directly of the movement and motion of waves: water waves, sound waves: the two are one and the same, although the medium of transmission mediates the construction and reception – the limitless context – of the body's engagement with sound. Thus the difference between being there and becoming the sound through sine waves is the dance of the body. The body serves as waystation of difference. It is the difference in sound itself – and so we all hear this CD differently.

4. Purely not theoretical conjecture, the final end of this CD corresponds to Lopez's performances: the ever-increasing sound, the lulls and dips of the chartography carved out in curves and swathes of field recordings, treated with an elemental conceptual debt to intuitive precision, then CUT.

By tobias c. van Veen

Other Reviews of Francisco Lopez Live in San Francisco Untitled 2004 Untitled #180 Untitled #244 Untitled (2009) Read More View all articles by tobias c. van Veen Find out more about Alien8