Francisco Lopez – Wind

The completion of Francisco Lopez‘ tryptich of american environmental recordings moulded into compositions of formal strictness and reduction. The first of the three – La Selva – featured sound recordings of the costa rican jungle, the second – buildings – consisted of noises of airconditioning and ventilating systems as well as other machinery found in buildings around New York. Both works are constructed after the same principle: every sound atmosphere stands for a couple of minutes and is then followed by the next atmosphere, any other compositional construction is neglected. In this way Lopez focusses the attention of the listener on the inner qualities of the sounds, without distracting tricks from the side of the composer. He believes in the “possibility of a profound, pure, blind listening of sounds, freed of the procedural, contextual or intentional levels of reference”. The live perfomances of Lopez are actually listening experiences of transcendental magnitude: he asks the audience to carry blindfolds and exposes the listeners to extremely processed field recordings at highest volume followed by abrupt level changes and super slow crescendi. This is then the conceptual change in his third piece – wind – that is basically the longest conceivable decrescendo: not a series of related sound atmospheres but a congruent montage of windshaked places found in Patagonia that progessivly diminuate in sound intensity. Listening to the piece is a very interesting physical experience: while the strong wind sounds of the beginning leave a kind of unrestful feeling, the eerie howling of the empty landscapes gradually gets more calming and peaceful, a sense of the pitiless being of nature evokes, of a place where the human is an alien in a dreamless surrounding. An essential recording of epic asceticism.