Genetic mutations
af Juliana Hodkinson 
Francisco López is an artist who has worked with field recordings for many years. Springing at first from recordings made in connection with his parallel career as a microbiologist, López has worked towards - and partly away from - a particularly extreme acousmatic variant which he calls ‘absolute concrète music’. In his essay ‘La Selva‘, he addresses a range of representational issues in relation to field recordings - including the difference between bioacoustic and ambient field recordings, and also the question of ‘realism’ in relation to sound reproduction.
I interviewed López by e-mail in connection with my Ph.D. on silence. I was interested in the extreme eventlessness of the continuous and homogenous soundfields of works from his ‘Untitled’ series such as # 91, # 118, # 129 and #150. It can seem like a perverse aesthetic project to work on eliciting lengthy hisses from recordings of, for example, botanic rainforest life that presumably teems with activity. But as hugely extended timbral studies that require intense listening (or ‘profound listening’, as López would put it himself in extension of Schaeffer’s ‘reduced’ and Pauline Oliveros’ ‘deep’ listening) in terms of both duration and decibels (lots of the former, not much of the latter), López’ most radical works are very true to the acousmatic laws on perception and abstraction that López is committed to. At the same time, López moves musique concrète decisively away from its stylistic legacy of fragmentation and differentiation between sonic objects, directly over to the opposite shore of drone aesthetics.
Hodkinson: What is your professional relationship to instrumental music?
López: None. Although I played drums in a punk band during my teenage years (late 70s), I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had any relationship to instrumental music. It is precisely because of my disinterest with instruments (both traditional and electronic) that my work is fundamentally based on field recordings of sound environments. For me the ‘real world’ is the best imaginable sound generator, as well as a constant source of inspiration for the work with sound.
Hodkinson: Can you say a bit about drones in your music and generally in electronic sound art today? One could say that the fi rst real ‘drone music’ was La Monte Young in the 1960s and early minimalist works such as Reich’s Four Organs (1970) – working with expansive durations, and continuous sounds with relatively unchanging characteristics. Is silence a drone too?
López: I consider the work of the American minimalists as the ‘harmonic’ version of the drone. I’m personally not very interested in this direction, although there are some remarkable exceptions (like Charlemagne Palestine or Roland Kayn). Historically, you could find ‘drones’ long before the composers you mention, including, of course, mantric and shamanistic practices, as well as many other forms of traditional music worldwide with very intense drone qualities. To me, the most interesting aspect of drones is their potential to create immersive sound environments in which the perception of sound has more to do with the creation of a virtual space than with isolated sonic events. Drones create a territory where one can wander and explore. They can also give rise to a sense of immanence that is absent in most music.
Hodkinson: How do the silences at the beginning and end of pieces like Untitled #150 influence your conception of form? Are they spaces of transition into the work, or absolute contemplation without the disturbance of audio input, or are they links out to the sounds external to your composition?
López: All the silences, pseudo-silences and quasi-silences in my pieces are essential parts of the compositions. Unlike Cage, I have no interest in using silence as a way to draw attention to outside sounds. Absolute physical silence (as a geometric circle, for example) is a conceptual construction. The Cagean question on silence is creatively irrelevant (it might be of more interest for an acoustic engineer). What is important is where we want to draw the perceptive attention, both as creators and as listeners. In my case, sound creations aim at being worlds in themselves, and they certainly contain silence. In fact, the existence and substance of silence is so dramatically paramount in my music that the features of any sounds are defined and conditioned by it.
Hodkinson: I read that you have in the past used recordings from rainforests, etc. as sources for your pieces. What other kinds/types of sounds do you use as recording sources? On your website, you seem to celebrate the emancipation of listening from knowledge. Once the identity of the sound has been erased, through filtering and processing, what relationship remains between the final result and the original source?
López: I use all kinds of field recordings in my work, from rainforests to big cities, from insects to machinery, from very loud to extremely subtle sounds. The ‘identity’ of the sound is not erased by transforming the sound but by a ‘reduced listening’ in the Schaefferian sense (i.e., listening to the phenomenological properties of sound, as opposed to the representational ones). The number of real sources we can recognize in sound recordings is actually a minority; most straight sound recordings don’t allow to identify the causes. When the original material is transformed we have a situation that I consider to be analogous to that of biological evolution, in the sense that there is a very wide possible range of ‘genetic’ distance from the original occurred through succesive mutation of the material. The degree of relationship with the recognizable original cause is thus a combination of the associative features of the sound and the extent of the transformation process. In any case, my work is focused on ‘sound objects’ (again, in the Schaefferian sense, regardless of their sources) as building blocks or malleable material to create self-contained virtual sound worlds.
Hodkinson: What software do you use generally? Do you use software that is developed or adapted especially for your work?
López: I use obsolete cracked or free software (mostly from the XXth century), of the common kind that is used today by thousands of other people worldwide (although most of them might have it updated). The most common programs for processing and editing that everybody knows and uses. We’re now living in a revolutionary situation without precedent in history because of the immense number of people sharing the same creative tools and
because of the almost immediate accessibility to start using these tools. Never before have we been able to so clearly appreciate the creative of spirit of people. That’s why technology is dissipating as a tool and becoming conceptually and creatively irrelevant.
Hodkinson: In your solo cd projects, is all the work produced entirely by you, or do you work closely with technicians, sound designers, etc.?
López: I don’t think I’d ever let a technician or sound engineer put his hands on the production or mastering of a piece. The rare occasions when this has happened it was a disaster.
Hodkinson: Finally, how do you respond to Christoph Cox’ description of your work as reviving a modernist aesthetic?
López: Why not? After all, in many respects postmodernism is a bit decadent. The more music I hear the more I am convinced of the importance of the individual essence. Maybe we need to overcome the dream of collective merging.
From an e-mail interview, September 2006