francisco lópez [ about ]

[ about ]

short bio Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he 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.

He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 180 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.

Imagine the sonic center of a maelstrom and you'll have some idea of the relentless swirling mass of thrum López generates [...] a masterful exercise in controlled sound manipulation [www.textura.org]

Perfectly formed sonic power, done in a rampaging style, combining ear-splitting volume with almost seismic catharsis [Giag, Latvia]

Powerful and ominous. Could be anything from tectonic movements to amplified bloodflow [www.chaindlk.com]

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]

López steadily turns (and tunes) the air within your ears against you [Dutch East India, USA]

After listening to this man Lopez I don't know what's going on in the world anymore [The Sound Projector, UK]

This donisis will change your view on what music could be [Drone, Germany]

A sonic beast [...], a paradox to confound physicists and philosophers alike [Dutch East India, USA]

francisco lópez absolute concrète music Over the last twenty five years Francisco López has been developing a powerful and consistent world of sound creations, 'trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrète music'. To date, his catalog comprises more than 180 sound works, which have been released by over 140 record labels throughout the world. He has toured extensively throughout Western and Eastern Europe, North, Central and South America, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand doing live acousmatic performances and sound installations, and he has received commissions from a number of renown 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), Creative Time (New York), Quartier Ephemere (Montreal), Sound Traffic Control (San Francisco), Argos Festival (Brussels) and Radio New Zealand (Auckland).

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 (50 countries in the 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.