The audience sits blindfolded in concentric circles, facing away from the performer. Refusing any visual accompaniment, and presenting sounds from his vast archive of field recordings without context or explicit identification, field recordist and sound artist Francisco Lopez asks the audience to wear these blindfolds to remove any distraction, and encourages them towards an intense focus on the sonic material he is about to present. Lopez describes the blindfolds as a ‘voluntary commitment to listening’. He believes that sounds are ‘things’, physical entities that have character(s) and substance. What follows is a bewildering array of material: rural, urban, animal, elemental.
Humans and their actions are audible in many of the recordings, many having the feel of out-takes: slamming doors; urban hum; the sound of the recordist walking and breathing heavily, trekking to a recording location. This presence, extended into reorganising the material into a performance, enters Lopez into discourse of authorship and the presence of the operator in field recording practices, and throws open the process, from preliminary research through to the physical recording, post-production and final presentation of the work.
His performance suggests a view of field recordings as something with which humans – who are themselves part of the ‘field’ – have an active relationship and dialogue rather than being passive observers of sound. Indeed, there is no acoustic ecology at play in Lopez's performance. Rural sounds jut up against cityscapes, and material is processed with equalisation and filtering, and diffused via multi-channel speaker system, creating an otherworldly audio space. No straight-laced documentation here. Archetypal hit-record-and-come-back-tomorrow recordings still feature heavily, but through this electronic manipulation are brought into the same strange realm as the cause-and-effect material.
The hour-long performance drifts between near-inaudible microsound explorations to dense meshes of audio, swirling in quadraphonic. The former allows the thrum of east London to occasionally penetrate Lopez's highly controlled environment, adding a further semiotic layer to the blindfolds and explorations of humans’ relation to the soundscape. It's a smart touch. Lopez's famously anti-academic practice removes field recording from a dry, closed-off studio practice, to a dialogue with the environment of its presentation.
Repeating several times during the set, these swells in density provide a somewhat episodic form. It is perhaps tempting to draw parallels between these tension and release blocks of dynamic texture with more clichéd notions of field recordings, that of tides and dawn choruses, but the structure's predictability is at times to the detriment of the material. Rather than sudden drops from maximal to minimal being a surprise, they become expected. It seems an odd choice. Given Lopez's wish for the audience to focus on the sonic material, rather than its temporal and dynamic organisation, the chosen structure for the performance detracts from the core of the work. This form feels out of kilter with his recorded work: long-form, studio-based improvisations in which Lopez lets the material dictate structure in considerably more subtle ways.
Nonetheless, Lopez is virtuosic in the choice of material from his vast archive. Strong winds rushing through long grass, bird song and footsteps all provide glimpses into the compositional process. These sounds are exquisitely captured, and Lopez's electronic processing, if any, shows his dedication to this practice; there is a lightness of touch and sensitivity to the details in the recordings that, at their best, are enchanting.
The denser periods of the performance, however, prove too rich; and the clarity fades in favour of obvious visceral excitement. Crashing, booming metal, low frequency distortion, and sometimes over-enthusiastic spatialisation draws the listener from the essence of Lopez's original fascination with sound. This is not to say that Lopez's performance was mediocre. Despite the sometimes over-saturating textures, I left the concert in a daze. Lopez's blending of disparate sound sources and removal of visual stimuli trigger abundant images in the mind's eye, rendering the audience in a near-hypnotic focused listening. There are moments of genius in his work: one highlight is one of the drops from texture overload to almost nothing. Heavy, writhing, grating urban noisefloor suddenly gives way, and what sound like underwater recordings of icebergs and ships creak, rumble, and gong: a slow canon that haunts the room. The drop in amplitude and density, in this instance, is stunning. The pressure release drops us into a completely new, and somehow more alien environment than the one before. We are strangers in Lopez's world, drifting at the whim of the sonic entities within. Perhaps his performances can be read as sonic sculptures: a very literal form of musique concréte.
