{"id":10735,"date":"2021-03-10T18:09:19","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T17:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cronicaelectronica.org\/?p=10735"},"modified":"2021-03-10T18:09:21","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T17:09:21","slug":"francisco-lopezs-dsb-reviewed-by-freq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.cronicaelectronica.org\/?p=10735","title":{"rendered":"Francisco L\u00c3\u00b3pez\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153DSB\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reviewed by Freq"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a quality that some music has of being like an old friend. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not listened to any new Francisco L\u00c3\u00b3pez<\/strong><\/a> in a decade or more but the \u00e2\u20ac\u212200s CDs of his I have get a fairly frequent spin. Those CDs tended towards a kind of quietism \u00e2\u20ac\u201d usually called Untitled [n]<\/em> and largely a kind of textural building from exceptionally quiet to pretty blaring. All with exquisite attention to sonic detail \u00e2\u20ac\u201d you could nominally call it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153noise\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be a fool to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s he up to in 2021? Well this apparently spans 2009-2019, so difficult to say precisely, but this seems to be collected and processed field recordings. And in proper sound-art fashion, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not quite enough material here to give a clear idea of the sorts of environments being recorded \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is that a\u00c2\u00a0watery sound or just some squelchy noise?Train station or generated rhythm? Submerged mics or studio trickery?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always difficult to know with L\u00c3\u00b3pez whether there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a narrative or if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d prefer that the listener make their own mind up about what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being heard. Here he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perhaps avoiding the intense building of the work I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m familiar with, preferring something more like a contraction and expansion of different elements \u00e2\u20ac\u201d incidental office environment sounds maybe, digital burrs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L\u00c3\u00b3pez is tricky to recommend in a specific way, I think. This is effectively some field recordings. Those are interesting or not, depending on the listener \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I could imagine this being super compelling to someone unfamiliar with that world, and is doubtless compelling to someone already familiar with that world. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly one of the greats of this quite specific sound-art \u00e2\u20ac\u201d plenty of forensic mic-detail but never too clean or asceptic with it, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s capable of exquisite beauty but doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the sort of fidelity fetish that can render this sort of material dry and academic. Which is to say, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s by a large margin one of the best at this kind of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a smidge of composerly drama \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth having a go in a darkened room with decent headphones \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but not so much as to be romantic or, dare I say it, musical in too specific a fashion. The second piece is perhaps the quieter of the two (though neither is much louder than ambient for any length of time) and it keeps making me wonder if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doting on the tone of the ambient noise within a given environment \u00e2\u20ac\u201d almost like he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bringing forwards the ambient background hum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lush album. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have the problems that these things often do \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it definitely\u00c2\u00a0demands a decent listening environment\u00c2\u00a0and half-decent gear. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s definitely the sort of thing hi-fi bores should use to show off their stereo equipment. And he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably the best in the album-based sound-art game, for my money. Kev Nickells<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

via Freq<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n