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Francisco López, "Untitled #244"
As a sporadic consumer of López's work, this album had a decidedly different feel than what I was expecting. I usually associate his name with cold, sterile digital sounds that occasionally veer into difficult territory, but always are worth the effort. Here, the work is much more organic and natural feeling, unsurprising given that it's based on field recordings of rivers in Argentina and Paraguay.
Throughout this single piece's 55 minute duration, the sound constantly mutates and evolves, never settling into a stagnant pattern.Instead, there feels like a shift every five minutes or so, not a drastic jump from one segment to another, but enough to keep things fresh. At various times, the untreated sounds of nature from the source recordings pop up, such as dripping water reverberated into a percussive expanse or what sounds like a woodpecker looped into a long pastiche.Recordings of rain are multitracked over one another to become a brutal symphony.
Other moments feel like the smallest elements of sound expanded to become oppressive:more than a few passages sound like recordings of silence amplified into infinity, the most subtle of low level sounds pushed into the red.Various forms of hissing and crackling exist mostly throughout the entire piece, never the same but always feel unified.
For me, the strongest facets of this work are the multiple, highly diverse crunchy textures that arise in different forms throughout.Early they take the form of crackling, clinking sounds, then expansive, hollow reverberations and granulated clicks.Other unidentifiable, but fascinating fragments of sound are there to be heard the whole time.
It's only into the final third or so that the various layers become congested, piling up onto one another to reach near painful levels:hissing, ultrasonic frequencies almost become an endurance test. This quickly falls apart, leaving almost near silence and the must subtle of sonic activity to close out the piece, fascinating little microcosmic textures that echo away into infinity.
While López's art is never "easy" listening, the organic, nature-sourced underpinnings of this album make it a more inviting work compared to the clinical dissections of sound he is most known for.The variety of sounds, alongside the constant flow of the piece make for a mesmerizing experience.
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