Francisco Lopez
Born: 1964
Birthplace: Madrid, Spain
Gender: Male
Nationality: Spanish
Occupation: Experimental music, sound art
Francisco López is known as the person with creative voice in investigational music. He has recorded over 200 works from great simplicity to high testing noise in over 25 years. It doesn’t matter how high or low the sound is, as long as enough attention is paid. This can be kind of hard because he speaks and does his materials really fast. Francisco’s work has been aesthetic, as he has been honoured for his work twice at the Ars Electronica Festival. Also, in 2006, he won the First Prize for the Sound Art Competition of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. He has additionally received 3 honorable mentions in the Prix Ars Electronica in the year 1999, 2002, and 2007.
He has his own way of performing in front of the audience, as he performs in total darkness, or hands out blindfolds to his participants. This helps the people get deeply involved into his sound makings and help them understand exceptionally what he’s trying to create. He has another purpose to blindfolds; not wanting the audience to know what he’s doing. Basically, the whole point of covering the eyes is to get people really involved with the sound. The sound system allows Lopez to have a lot of adaptability for working with the space and the sounds. This gets the people into the sound world he’s trying to create. He calls his work “the exploration of the universe of broad-band noise from the real world”, because his music rises from the nature and the environment around him.
The setup of his performance
The way the room is setup is by placing surround system all around it in a circle outside the seats for the audience. He likes the performance to happen in complete darkness, so the audience has to face the speakers with blindfolds. Also, he performs in the middle of the seats to have control over the circle. The reason for his arrangements is that so the audience can listen very carefully to what sound he is making. Thus, with the intense focus they can discover many different unique sounds that they haven’t heard before. He uses the sounds that he has recorded from before, and processes them in the studio to combine during the live performance in different ways.
“My music is loaded with a multitude of cultural references, from the soundtrack of “Eraserhead” to some sound approaches in Buddhism. Whether or not these are apparent is more a question of perception than of explicit explanation. What is essential to it, though, is the fact that I don’t attach myself to any specific system of aesthetic, conceptual or spiritual beliefs. I think its universal reach potential is dependent upon the individual -more than social or cultural- attitudes concerning listening and creation. Both pop music and rock’n'roll (in a wide sense) are deeply attached to certain cultural references, yet they’ve made their way into the universal reach realm all over the world.” – Francisco Lopez
His influences
The environment has been a major influence on Fransisco’s understanding of the creation of soundworks. The complicating sound environments, their natural richness, the unusual pace of the flow of sound events, are an example. He likes to use dramatically slow changes that happen to the environment, with extreme level changes that occur in it. He has an intense focus on broad-band sounds and their complexity that are all the things people find in the clear reality of nature.
Lopez performs completely differently in comparison to other artists. He likes his performance to take place in a dark room with people wearing blindfolds so they don’t look at him or each other while listening to his sounds. This creates involvement with sounds around them. Something else that is different about him is that he doesn’t believe in attempting to achieve something such as advertising or teaching. He just does what he loves doing without trying to make it noticeable. He is not interested in any theories of description or meaning, and he tries to create a more free world around him.
Lopez also tries to create interesting sounds by investigating and trying it out. Just like other sound artists, his main purpose is to create something that hasn’t been discovered yet. Sound is everywhere, so they all try to bring it out in their own ways. Lopez and other sound artists share a more essential approach and appreciation of the different sounds surrounding them. This is an entertainment for themselves and their audiences. It is also an influence from them to others, as in to never give up on what they love to do and discover something new to show it with the world.
