Francisco López

Todd L. Burns

Thank you all for coming to the first lecture of this lovely day. I have the great pleasure, sitting next to me is Francisco López, who is an experimental artist, musician, sonicist and many other things. His music is very specific, so I thought it might be best to start off with a composition that he made in... was it 1997? Called La Selva. We might as well go ahead and play it and while he’s playing it we’ll put some images up on the screen of some of the places that have been central to your work through the years, and we’ll explain what that means afterwards. In the interests of time we’re only going to be playing an excerpt of a 70-minute piece; we’ll only be playing about 65, 69 minutes. [laughter]

(music: Francisco López – “La Selva” / applause)

Francisco López

Thank you very much; thank you everyone for coming to this lecture. We mentioned before this is a fragment from a composition, or a soundpiece, that was made from recordings, non-mixed, non-transformed, straight from recordings from the rainforest in Costa Rica, where I lived and worked for a number of years. We wanted to start with this because the rainforest for me has been a transformative force, an extremely influential experience. I’ve been working in rainforests all over the world for a long time. This is an image from the Amazon in Brazil where I do a residency workshop every year in the rainforest.

Todd L. Burns

Why are you in the rainforest? How do you get there? What got you there in the first place?

Francisco López

I’m also a biologist, I’ve been doing research and teaching in biology for many years. Somehow my life has been, I like to say Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a number of reasons, between research in biology and sound and music. Those two things have been in parallel my entire life. So my experience of the rainforest is as someone who’s been working there and spending extended periods of time in the field and, because of this, because of being exposed to the richness of these environments, sonic richness and many other aspects, but in particular in relation to sound. I was originally drawn to the rainforest because of my research in biology, but I was also doing sound recordings. Among other things, something that is particularly important, the rainforest is an environment that is extremely rich, it has all these incredible complexities of sounds, these 24-hour constant changes, the variety and range of things is incredible. But you don’t see the sources of all this sonic complexity. I like to say it’s a naturally acousmatic environment, meaning a place where you have an amazing sonic display all the time but you cannot see the sources of all these sounds. It’s an invisible world, basically. And it is pretty much like that for all the organisms who live in this environment. They basically have to predate each other, escape each other and survive in this environment by listening. So that’s one aspect of the rainforest in relation to sound that had an extremely strong influence on my work.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things that was so loud in that recording were the cicadas, I think. It’s one of the animals of the rainforest you hear very loudly, but you almost never see them. It’s right in front of your face but you never actually get to see them. It’s a very strange experience, I think.

Francisco López

In this recording we’re hearing lots of frogs, of course, many different species of frogs at the same time in a way that naturally happens in this particular environment. Also, cicadas and leafhoppers that produce the highest frequencies. And some birds and a bunch of other things. In the case of the cicadas, especially daytime cicadas, some of them are extremely loud and you can hear them very, very close, but it’s almost impossible to find them. So you have this paradox of this intense, rich, in-your-face experience while you cannot find visually the sources of all these sounds. That is an intense paradox and beauty at the same time for me of this natural environment.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things that’s most interesting about this recording – and I think it’s a good way to talk about your approach to music – is that you decided to tell people exactly what you did and exactly where you were when you recorded it. With a lot of your other recordings, you don’t do so. You try to create a situation where you have no expectations, necessarily, going in. Why did you decide with La Selva that it was important to let people know?

Francisco López

To answer your question, these are images from different locations all over the world where I’ve done field recordings, because this is what I do. I spent my life travelling around doing recordings in all kinds of places, not only rainforests and natural environments but also cities and man-made environments, artificial environments of all kinds. But there is a paradox and to answer your question, which is I am not interested in representation. I’m not interested in soundscapes that represent reality. I’m not doing recordings because I want to simulate or re-enact or recompose or listen again to this reality. I don’t believe in this. And the more I work with reality – so-called reality – the more I’m convinced that this is a futile attempt at reproducing reality. To me, what is interesting in this back and forth between the reality and the sound compositions, artificial ways of reproducing sounds and so on – and I can show you examples of ways that I do this – is actually a very complex interaction with a substance of reality. It comes from reality, the sound recordings, in the same way a photograph is in a very intricate relationship with a reference to reality. That is not about reproducing that reality, but exploring the substance of the reality. In other words, this is a phenomenological approach to the connection with reality. I’m interested in the substance of reality, in texture, in complexity, in richness, in virtual space, in the idea of space that we have from reality, in the idea of time that we get from reality. All those things are not necessarily representational. In this particular piece that I played a fragment of at the beginning, La Selva – there is a CD release of this piece and what I did is there’s a lot of information in the booklet of this CD, but the booklet is closed. At the beginning there’s an indication, a short text, advising the listener not to open this booklet. I did it this way, and I’ve done it in different ways, this strategy of allowing the listener to decide to go into a path of no return, when you have information about something that in this case comes from reality, because once you know about this your way of listening to these sounds will change. This is a natural process, and a normal process. We are obviously influenced by what we know, especially when we’re dealing with what we call real sounds; we’re definitely influenced by what we know in the way we listen to things. But because there’s a reality to the experience and a reality to the place, I wanted to have this information about the place. Then it’s in the hands of the listener to decide how much of when, how, if you want to access that information in relation to your listening experience.

Todd L. Burns

You seem to have a very fully-formed philosophy about these things. How do we get here? When you were growing up in Madrid, you were listening to what type of music? What led you down this path?

Francisco López

I’ve always been interested in music, perhaps in sound more than music, and I did other kinds of music before. I started doing this in 1980 and before that I was playing drums in different bands. This was the post-punk time, new wave, punk. I was interested in different kinds of music, but I had this other interest that I couldn’t really realize or develop in a band. One of the frustrations for me playing in bands is that there was always a compromise – I like this, you like that, let’s do something in between. There was also an extreme limitation playing with instruments with what I felt I could do with sound and what I felt I was hearing in this reality. At the time I was already doing sound recordings. To me, there was always this extreme difference between the possibilities of working with any sound in any imaginable way with the technology of the time – which was completely different from what we have today, obviously – and what you can do with instruments. There’s nothing wrong about instruments, but the field and the range of possibilities to me of working with sound were much wider. Also very different rules in reality in the way sound unfolds, in the way it happens in reality, dramatically different to what happens in the instrumental realm in general. So from the beginning I always had this feeling I wanted to do something – it wasn’t clear to me what it was exactly, but I wanted to do something that related to that complexity and to that richness of reality that was, in my view, way beyond instruments.

Todd L. Burns

Were there certain bands that opened your eyes to this idea that this is a possibility? Or these people are doing something that’s worth exploring further?

Francisco López

Definitely, the early industrial music was one of my references. I started listening to Esplendor Geométrico, this band from Madrid. We actually knew each other even before that because we grew up in the same neighborhood in Madrid. Then other bands like Throbbing Gristle, of course, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi in Italy, Hunting Lodge in the States. At the time there was this small constellation of different bands in industrial music that were not exactly connected to this kind of work with sound recordings. But they were definitely experimenting in a direction that I found very appealing, towards the more abstract, more obscure perhaps, and also to more open ways of dealing with sound. I had the feeling, and the people working this area had the feeling, that anything was possible, more or less, in terms of aesthetics. Not with the technology, but in terms of aesthetics a lot of things were possible that were different from the tradition of rock & roll and pop culture, and also other traditions of music. To me, that was very appealing, and to me that was a territory where you could more or less do whatever you wanted to do and proceed with your own path. This took place later on during the ‘80s with cassette culture. I was very involved in so-called home music networks and cassette culture. Within that international network of people working with home music and cassette music, there was the territory for doing whatever you wanted to do – it was really anything. I don’t have any proper musical or technical education for sound, but that was my school, let’s say, this international community that’s [about] change and collaboration by mail with many different artists all over the world.

Todd L. Burns

What did some of the first things you were producing sound like? You weren’t already field recording in the ‘80s when you were doing these cassettes, or were you?

Francisco López

Yes, but also from the beginning I had this feeling that what I had in these recordings was something quite different to the original thing. Normally, it’s understood that this isn’t the real thing. Most people will say a recording is just a recording, it’s not the real thing. For sure. But we need to look at this in different ways because sometimes what you have in a recording is better than what we have in reality. This was, in an intuitive way, my feeling from the beginning. I always had the feeling the recordings were a different world. And while not a deficient world, it’s a world with its own self- contained rules and with its own parameters and with its own richness. In many respects it was actually better. One of the reasons why I think this world of recordings might be better than reality is that the machines we use to capture reality were the things in reality. They have a big advantage. They can do something we cannot do, which is they don’t think when they perceive reality, and this is something we cannot do. We have to do incredible things around it in order to get close to anything like that, perceiving reality without thinking. Our perception of reality is always cognitive, not only because we have prejudice; besides that is we are thinking creatures, we see reality through models. We don’t see reality, we don’t hear reality. Now machines, within their range, within the range of a microphone, digital encoding or whatever it is, they don’t think. This is a massive advantage. My point has always been, first in a more intuitive way, now perhaps more elaborated because of my experience, has always been that we should co-operate with the machines. We should stop criticizing them because they are efficient and we should co-operate with them. My feeling from the beginning was this kind of feeling. In the same way, because I wasn’t interested in representation, what I did with those first recordings was to start working in development in my personal way of this other world made with substance from reality – this independent self-sustained, self-contained world from that substance from reality. In fact, I have an example of that: At the time I wasn’t thinking of compositions, but one of the first things I did by transforming in a very crude and very rudimentary way by working only with cassette recorders and extremely limited technology – I didn’t have a studio, I didn’t have a mixer, of course no computers, but also no good equipment – just fiddling around with cassette recorders. I can play for you an example of that transformation of reality.

Todd L. Burns

Sure. What is it called?

Francisco López

“Untitled,” like most of my pieces are untitled.

(music: Francisco López – Untitled / applause)

Thank you. This is from 1980.

Todd L. Burns

It seems strange to me, or interesting, that you had this philosophy that seems almost fully formed so early on. That you had this idea that the possibilities are endless, that the scope needed to be broadened somehow. I’m wondering how you came to this so easily, it seems.

Francisco López

At the time I didn’t have the ability to articulate these ideas as well as perhaps I can do it today because it was more of a gut feeling. First thing, my taste for sound – as it was for a number of other people, taste meaning the direction you want to create, the things you find appealing. And then the feeling that the reason why I was interested in doing recordings was not related just to these questions of reproducing environments or places or voices or people, whatever it is, but more of an intuitive and clear idea that my interest was in sound, the texture of sound, and this other world was starting to unfold. At the time I wouldn’t say it this way, it wouldn’t be so clear to me that I was trying to work in a different world. I was just working with the sounds and going in the direction that I found most interesting to me.

Todd L. Burns

You said that was called “Untitled” and a lot of your work is untitled. In 1997, I think it was, you sort of made a break and did not title almost anything after that. I’m wondering why.

Francisco López

Most of the pieces I did during the ‘80s were untitled. But there’s a number of reasons why I’m not giving names to pieces or releases. It triggers a whole discussion and triggers also some social issues, meaning that, for example, you have to struggle with record labels. Record labels don’t like this because they like to have some kind of description. In one extreme case I had a release that was coming out on a record label and we didn’t do the release in the end because the people at the record label told me, “This untitled thing, you’ve done it before, so we don’t want to call this CD Untitled. You should give it a title.” To me, this was a funny situation because I wasn’t doing it because I wanted to make one statement one day and then the next I want to do something different. To me, the question of not giving titles to pieces is a fundamental question because I believe that that contributes somehow to not giving clues to the listener about the purpose, the meaning of this particular release or piece. I believe the meaning or the possibilities of any recording are actually open to the listener to decide what it is, to have his or her own experience of the sound piece. That’s the reason why I do this, but then you have the struggle with a number of different situations. For record labels sometimes, for live presentations, concerts, installations. There’s always this question of, “Yes, but what is this?” Or, “What do you mean? What are you expressing?” I’m one of those people, I believe I’m not expressing myself in music, that’s not what I try to do. So I’m in this constant struggle and my ideal situation would be to have everything untitled. This is one of my latest releases [holds up CD] and it’s entitled 275, so I’m managing to do it more or less. In some other cases what I’ve done is a different strategy that also has to do with this confrontation with reality, which is when something is created in a place, I just give the name of the place. Then it’s up to the listener to decide what is the connection, what it is we’re hearing, listening to in connection to that place. Like the case of La Selva, which is the name of a place in Costa Rica.

Todd L. Burns

You also did one release, or a number of releases, where you were in buildings in New York, which you also titled. Is that correct?

Francisco López

That was a project with sound environments with large office buildings, apartment buildings in New York. The sound environments of the buildings, the heating system, the electrical system, the elevators and all that. The name of the release that came out is called Buildings New York. It’s clear that it’s made in certain buildings in New York, it uses only material that is not transformed and that’s it. Now, what is the connection with that and what are we hearing when we listen to that? These are the questions that was mentioned before about not being representational and so on.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s talk about your live shows: They’re infamous, I guess, would be the best word to describe them. You often have people blindfolded and sitting down and you try to minimize yourself as much as possible, in terms of being seen and people seeing what you’re doing. It’s very similar to your records in a way, in that you want people to draw their own conclusions. I guess it‘s all part of the same process, trying to allow people to have the experience to put their own stuff onto what you’re doing and not be told what it is or how it’s being made.

Francisco López

Let me bring this gentleman here to explain what it is for a minute. He can give you a summary of what I do in their version.

(video: Israeli news broadcast of Francisco López concert / applause)

That gave you a news version of what it is I do for television. But I think he’s right in a lot of different things. What I’ve been working on over the years is a reconfiguration of the situation for listening, meaning first a reconfiguration of the performative space. I refuse the use of the stage and the configuration of the stage, which means not only not being on stage, but also moving away from frontal soundsystems. I use surround systems with multi- channel soundsystems usually. I don’t have my system, but I adapt to different spaces. These are examples of performances, the arrangement of the space in different countries. [slideshow starts]

Within the limitations of the spaces and the possibilities of different spaces you see a very clear configuration of seating for the audience as well as the equipment. Normally what I do is I’m in the middle of that space and I’m in the middle, let’s say, with the audience – meaning that I want to hear more or less what the audience is hearing. I can’t be on stage following the sound through monitors, which is a prototypical situation for a lot of different music on stage. Because what I do live is I work with sound. It’s not only that I produce sounds with instruments, but I transform sound and I manipulate the sound as a physical phenomenological entity in this space. So I need to be where the audience is. This doesn’t mean every single person in the audience is hearing the same thing; obviously there are differences in the space, this is a different story. But my reconfiguration of the space has to do with, first, that aspect of being with the audience in order to hear more or less the same thing. Second thing is that the audience is not looking towards the center, but they’re looking outwards, facing the speakers around that configuration. By doing this – I’ve done it in many different ways in different spaces – I try to generate basically an immersive experience in sound that has to do with this reconfiguration. That happens also in the dark with blindfolds for the audience. This reconfiguration of space, this playing with different spaces and different systems, is something I’ve been doing in a combination of performances and sound installations in many different ways.

[switching through photos in slideshow] These are examples of soundsystems in different spaces. This is from an installation with 250 speakers in the Spanish pavilion of an expo that took place in Spain a few years ago. This is an amazing system for moving sounds around, but it’s not so good for having a good presence of the sound relative to the space. But that’s another story, perhaps. This is a recent installation I did in New York with a system with 100 speakers in two concentric domes in a concert hall, only with rainforest recordings from many different places in the world turned into a hyper-real rainforest. In fact, the name of this performance installation is Hyper- Rainforest, because it’s not representing the rainforest, but is using the elements of many different rainforests to create an extremely hyper-realistic, beyond-the-normal representation, experience of the complexity of these materials. This is a much more modest installation in a forest in France filtering the frequencies of insects from different forests and turning them into a very subtle, very small, one-person-at-a-time installation in the forest. This is an installation I did here in Matadero two years ago with these extremely comfortable recliners, which we used to try to obliterate the presence of the body somehow. To some extent that happened. I was using a combination of speakers and headphones simultaneously. So we had speakers around these recliners, plus additional listening through headphones. It’s an interesting combination because when you combine those two you can do a lot of interesting things. Also, I’ve done some literal immersion underwater, some concerts underwater with speakers underwater. It’s a totally different realm for many different reasons, because the rules of acoustics underwater are very different. And the rules of behavior and the possibilities for listening are also very different.

Todd L. Burns

What did you do there? I’m fascinated by that. You spent quite a lot of time underwater researching how the acoustics are different, I assume.

Francisco López

I wanted to spend more time than I had the opportunity to. This is a concert in London in a pool organized by a collective of people in London who organize performances underwater in different pools across the UK. It was an incredible opportunity to do this unusual kind of performance, but unfortunately we didn’t have that much time for the soundcheck, a few hours only. Doing the soundcheck for this is quite complicated because you have to jump in the water and back to the mixing board and back to the water and back to the mixing board and so on.

Todd L. Burns

Does that mean you have to dry off completely before you touch the mixing board?

Francisco López

I wasn’t doing that, obviously. Even during the performance I was jumping in the water and listening to certain parts then coming back out of the water. It’s such a new territory when you work with this and when you have to do it quickly, like in this case, you do whatever you can do and I did what I could in the time I had. But what was interesting about this experience was the realization of how interesting it would be to work with more time and more dedication, being true to the different nature of what happens underwater. Underwater it’s very difficult to localize the source of sounds, which might be an advantage, of course. It’s very difficult to drive low frequencies because of the density of the medium, so you need extremely powerful speakers to produce low frequencies underwater. But it doesn’t happen with most underwater speakers. And then stereo is not stereo underwater so you have a completely different set of rules and that I think needs to be explored with more time than in these performances. I selected a many materials that I thought would work well with these features of the acoustic environment and I think I more or less succeeded to some extent with that experience. The other factor, obviously, is that people cannot be diving for too long so you have to be going down and up and breathing and swimming and moving around. The water here was very cold and this was a performance with other performers that took place over a couple of hours, and after a couple of hours in cold water it was quite a challenge to be there listening. But I learned a lot from this experience and what I will do if I have another chance to work underwater. [applause]

And the blindfold is something I started using...

Todd L. Burns

When did you start that? At what point did you either have the power to say: “This is how we’re gonna do it,” or say...?

Francisco López

I think it was in the mid-’90s, when I started doing this, when I realized it was impossible to get spaces completely dark. To get a space pitch black is very difficult, much more difficult than it seems to be, because sometimes when you turn off the lights everything seems to be dark, but after a few minutes you start to see things because you get used to the darkness. But also because I’m typically in the middle of the audience and I have equipment with lights, so it turns into the opposite. So I started suggesting the idea and providing blindfolds for optional voluntary use by the audience. All the people here haven’t been forced to be blindfolded, they did it voluntarily. [talking about photo of blindfolded audience in slideshow] I always emphasize that at the beginning of the performance. It’s a crucial aspect to highlight the fact that I’m not forcing anyone to do this – this is an optional thing. By having individual darkness with a blindfold you listen better because you’re not seeing anything. We know that the visual component of our perception dominates, or obliterates sometimes, the hearing. But there’s something else that happened that I didn’t predict or plan. That is, when this happens in this way collectively and voluntarily, there is something else, which is a sense of collective commitment and voluntary acceptance of this very unusual way of following a performance. This creates somehow a collective ritual, game, something like that, that is voluntarily accepted and it creates this collective sense of commitment to the listening during that short time of the performance. To me, that’s perhaps even more important than this aspect of not seeing and therefore listening better.

Todd L. Burns

It’s something you seem to want from your listeners, from what I’ve read in interviews. Commitment, more than anything else, to the music that you make is pretty important. This is a very nice by-product of the blindfold that you get that extra commitment there.

Francisco López

Yes, I would say so. I have a lot of commitment to what I do. I’m not expecting everyone to like it, by no means, but for whoever wants to try it, I offer a lot of commitment, dedication, a lot of work done in order to create this experience and I ask for it. I don’t demand this, but I think a commitment is something that’s somehow dissipating. If you think about the overload of information, one of the problems is we have too much information, we have too many things, we don’t know how to focus our attention and so on. One of the consequences of this is not only the question of finding information or not, it’s also the reduction or the decrease of commitment to individual things. I’m not sure to what extent this is a problem or not or whether we’re adapting with different strategies to this, but there’s definitely a question there that has to do with commitment. So what I try to offer is a very strong, intense experience with sound only, and then through that and with commitment I think you can reach, individually, different territories that are personal, emotional, internal, that I have no control over by any means, that I think are extremely interesting territories. And I like to think of this, of course the aspect of synaesthetic experience when you don’t see and you’re hearing things; of course you start imagining things or you start seeing things somehow. But those things are very personal, and that reaction happens naturally, and I like to think of synaesthesia as multimedia inside the body. So I’m more interested in multimedia, inter-media, transmedia aspect inside the body than outside the body. And I think when you do that, when you voluntarily temporarily refuse, you have some sense of deprivation. What you discover is this multimedia inside your body or your mind or the combination of the two.

Todd L. Burns

Do you have that experience when you’re working on music? Or is it just hard work?

Francisco López

I definitely have had that experience when I work with music, both in my solitary studio work and also during live performances. I don’t have a studio and I don’t have a system like any other systems that I can use during a live performance. So, for me, the live performance becomes this very interesting and intense experience of having the sound, in the way it happens with those systems and with those spaces and that large-scale situation, that I cannot do in any other way. When I’m doing the live performance I have the combination of enjoying this, experiencing this, which is different in every space and every soundsystem, and having the responsibility of creating an interesting experience for all these people and not going beyond certain limits. Meaning having a good control of the intensity, the contrast and the dynamics of a live performance. It is my belief that a lot of people working with sound today, they don’t really know much about sound. They know how to generate sounds, but after that I see a lot of sloppiness in working with sound. I think whoever who works with sound in a live situation has the responsibility of not doing something too crazy that, for example, can damage the hearing of people. As we all know, that’s very easy. Small movements of faders or knobs can have a dramatic effect in a live space. So, for me, a live performance is a combination of excitement, enjoyment and responsibility.

Todd L. Burns

You mentioned the word “dissipation” just a minute ago and it seems like a word that’s been a big thing for you. You have this essay that you’re working on, or finished, called the Dissipation of Music, I believe. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means to you and why it’s become a central idea in your work?

Francisco López

There was a time in the 19th century during Romanticism in which a number of poets – not musicians, but poets – created the idea and wrote about it extensively under the description of absolute music, where they defended the idea that the highest form of art was music, because music was ineffable. Music was something that could trigger all these emotions, could have all these different effects without meaning anything specific, without being about anything in particular. And without us being able to translate that into words. One of the questions that had was they reached a point where they felt poetry was limited by language in a way that they couldn’t go beyond the language conventions and so on. I’m making a very crude description of this, but basically the idea was that the form, if there is a form of art that is really ineffable, that we cannot translate into words in a good, efficient way, then that is music and music has this incredible potential. This, in the Western world, was a reaction to what happened immediately before, up to the 18th century, because up to that point music was predominantly in Western culture used for opera and for storytelling through opera. This was a reaction to that. This was a very brief moment in the history of Western music, this idea, because the 20th century after that has been a lot about reconfiguring the ideas of how to structure music, where is music coming from, where music can be coming from, and a lot about breaking conventions of the structure and breaking conventions of sources of sounds and what is music and what is not music. In the process, this brief moment in the history of Western music has been an exception, actually, a brief moment where music wasn’t about anything, because music was not about convention, not about technology or meaning or expression or anything like that. So far as I know this is the most intense conception of music as something absolute – and it’s absolute in that sense.

This for me, I don’t do music of the 19th century – or maybe I do, I’m not sure – but maybe I connect more with that idea than any of the 20th century or in the 21st century. The question of the dissipation of music has to do with how much of the experience of music in that very strong fundamental sense might be dissipated by a number of things. One of them is a structuralist conception of music and a structuralist conception of music applies not only to traditional music, it applies of course to pop and rock culture – they are very traditional and very systematic about aesthetics, structures and about styles. Because of that I respect all kinds of music. I actually like many different kinds of music. But what I’m interested in exploring in my territory has to do with the attempt at moving away from structure, technology – technology in the sense of talking about it or showing it or putting it forward when making music – and moving into this other territory. I think it’s clear from these examples that I’m following certain strategies in that direction. These strategies are not 100 percent efficient, there are of course problems with these stradegies. But I’m working with the strategies that have to do with bringing the listener into a territory that I hope is a blank phenomenological territory of experience.

Todd L. Burns

Do you regard people working today as your peers, people working towards the same things, who have the same philosophy? Obviously, you’ve done an enormous amount of collaborations, but I can’t imagine that everyone has that same philosophy about music. Are there certain people you really connect with?

Francisco López

There’s a lot of people I connect with in terms of music making or sound making and I’ve done collaborations with a lot of people. That is different to having the connection in terms of this idea of presentation and this idea of how to convey the music in a public situation or for a recorded release. That is different. Among those people would be John Duncan, an American artist who’s also been working in the dark, perhaps for different reasons and in a different way. Bbut he’s also very much into the idea of creating this... he works a lot with fear, for example, and stress and he puts people in dangerous situations. I’m not exactly playing with that but we share part of the same territory, there are reasons why we work in the dark that are common to both of us. We have collaborated so perhaps his case is the clearer one in which we share parts of this.

Todd L. Burns

As you mentioned, you have done an enormous amount of collaborations. I was looking at your website the other day and it would take me probably 10 minutes to read the names of all the people that you’ve done things with. What are you looking for in a collaborator most of all? More than anything else?

Francisco López

I suppose it’s the learning and the influence of somebody external. Somebody with different ideas to bring different elements into the making of something. I have to say I don’t feel the need for collaborators, but every time I collaborate I learn something new, and I always feel the influence has been at least partly positive, that it has brought things I would never imagine. This is typical for music-making in collaboration. That’s something very general in music, but it definitely comes into the equation of why to do a collaboration. There’s one aspect that is different to playing with instruments in a collaboration, which is here, when every single person can produce any sound and can manipulate any sound in any imaginable way, the contribution of somebody else is not equivalent to the contribution of adding one layer, one element, one texture that you’ll have with an instrument. Again, this isn’t to say that it’s better than an instrument, but the degree of transformation, the degree of contribution from somebody to the work that you’re doing, it’s quite wide and it could be anything. For example, as most of you know when you practise, when you record something, you pass it on to somebody else, that somebody else is going to do a transformation of that, it comes back to you and so on – real time or no real time. That back and forth, with the possibility of transformation, that’s so large and so big that the interest of the collaboration probably has to do more with ideas than contribution in terms of specific sound components to the collective group music-making.

Todd L. Burns

Could you maybe play two or three collaborations that you’ve done that show the breadth of what happens when you work with someone?

(music: Francisco López & Reinier van Houdt – Untitled / applause)

Thank you, thank you. This was made with only sounds from the piano. I have another example, a short piece, short track, two minutes, that I made with a friend from the Czech Republic who does a lot of recordings. He gave me the recordings for this track, so in that sense it’s a collaboration, because this is based exclusively on those recordings. It’s a very simple thing that you’ll recognize immediately.

(music: Francisco López – unknown)

Thank you. That is, believe it or not, the sound of my snoring. [laughter] The last example, which is perhaps a couple of minutes, is a collaboration with myself over time. What I did is I took recordings I made 30 years ago and made a piece out of those recordings, by mutating and transforming, radically processing and evolving these things. I was somehow looking at myself a long time ago and trying to get something out of that with the eyes of today. This comes originally from an idea that was very different in the sense that the degree of the transformation of sounds, coming originally from sound recordings of real things, is extreme. This has been through – and something I do a lot – many generations of transformation of sound. Like, I transform a sound and then the third generation, this generation will be the beginning of the second one and so on. Which is a very common thing to do, but I do it very extensively. This happened after many generations, I don’t know how many, and turned into this thing. Some people would say it’s abstract; it’s not abstract, it’s actually very concrete. But anyway. Very ‘not real’ result of the process.

(music: Francisco López – unknown / applause)

Thank you.

Todd L. Burns

I think there’s something in all of those to ask about. Let’s start with the first one: A piano player? Are you softening in your old age, going to conventional instruments, making it plain as to what you’re doing?

Francisco López

No, it’s only when you’re old that they let you do the things like that, like a piano composition. When you’re younger they don’t let you do it. It’s a matter of experience. I work with musicians, with compositions for ensembles – this is an example from Berlin – I suppose, they only take you seriously after a while, at least as my case has been. After a while, if you are given the opportunity and have any interest in working in that realm, they might give it a try. For me, this has happened after many years and having the entire sound world at my fingertips. Basically, I’ve been exploring what I could do with an ensemble of musicians or a piano player given the opportunity.

Todd L. Burns

Was there a certain point once you realized you were getting taken seriously? That you had entered into another echelon of people and the talk around you wasn’t “what is he doing?” anymore, and more, “here’s experimental composer, Francisco López”?

Francisco López

Yes, that happens, and in my case it happened after many years. In the ‘80s, for example, I didn’t do any performances. First because I didn’t have any opportunities for performances. I was in Madrid at the time and there’s not really a place here. I remember people from the electronic scene at the time telling me what I was doing wasn’t music and wasn’t worth it. I got refused, for example, a track for a compilation album of experimental music that was released in Madrid, and I was told that what I was doing was not music within that realm of experimental music. In the same way there was not really a place where you could do music live. But also I thought that I couldn’t really do music live because I’ve always been a studio person.

Todd L. Burns

What was the breakthrough?

Francisco López

It was probably just to start doing it. The first shows I did were actually in the States, and there I discovered through collaboration with different artists from the States that actually, given the opportunity, you could actually do a lot of work live. And all that I know about performing live has to do with this experience and just by doing it. Then I discovered through live performance that I could do a lot of work in live performance, even if I’m playing with samples and things I had pre-recorded. But what I do – and you have to believe me that what I do live is a lot of work – that is not generating the sounds, but it’s transforming and specializing the sounds, which is a simultaneous process of different controllers and I have to do a lot of work. And all of this comes from the experience and the realization that what is important to do live, to me, is to work with the sound. And that requires a lot of work, that is not necessarily having a generator of sound, instrumental or electronic.

Todd L. Burns

Has the technology enabled you to do that better over the years or have you always been able to do what you want live in transforming the sound?

Francisco López

Well, the change in technology has allowed me definitely to have more flexibility, a wider range, more quality in the final result. But also, the portability is very important to me, because I’ve been traveling and living in different places for a number of years and this computer here is currently my studio and everything else. I don’t have a studio. The quality of computers that I like the most is the denaturalization quality of computers. I’m not a gear-oriented person. I use a lot of gear, but I don’t like to have gear, so I’m very happy that we’re living in this time where you can do most of the processes that you need to do with a laptop. The only tools that I use are basically Pro Tools and simple editing for sound, like Peak or something like that. So it’s not so much the technology that comes from the computer but the fact you can do it anywhere and in a very simple way and in a very cheap way. And I’m very happy to live in these times because of this. The changes in technology have allowed me enormous flexibility with where I can be and what I can achieve with very simple means. In the ‘80s, for example, the difference between professional technology for both studio and field recording and let’s say amateur technology, the difference was gigantic. Today the difference is narrowing down to the point where we’re almost at the same point between with what billions of people can have and professionals can have. I think the difference in price in the equipment doesn’t reflect the difference in quality. I’m not talking about the quality of the music, I’m talking about the technical quality of the sound. I think we’re basically at the point were there’s no difference. You cannot tell, and I will challenge anyone to tell me where or with what something has been recorded as a master. I do all the masters of my releases now currently in this computer. The point is how you do it and how much experience – I think experience gives you a lot of ways of doing things in an interesting way and not so much the technology. So definitely the changes in technology towards what people call the democratization of technology – though I prefer socialization of technology – has been a big change and a big relief for me.

Todd L. Burns

The second composition we played obviously was you snoring and I think I’ve heard another one with you snoring as well. Maybe it was the same composition.

Francisco López

I’ll make a confession. That was the combined snoring of all my ex-girlfriends that I happened to record over the years. [laughter / applause]

I suppose it’s very symbolic.

Todd L. Burns

There’s something in there; I don’t think we need to go there. I suppose before I new that the question would have been the humor in your music.

Francisco López

Is it there?

Todd L. Burns

I laughed at the end of the snoring thing, it’s hilarious to me.

Francisco López

I think to some extent there is humor, there’s everything in what I do that has to do with my limited personal subjective sense of whatever. But I think there’s always humor in different ways, sometimes less obvious ways than these examples. Yeah, I think so.

Todd L. Burns

The last one, I was struck and reminded of how much, especially in more of your early stuff, silence plays such an enormous role. Tell me a little bit about your perspective on using that as a force, as a sound, I suppose.

Francisco López

I’ve been using silence as part of the compositions of different tracks in extensive ways. Sometimes absolute silence, meaning digitally speaking no sound recording. Sometimes quasi-silence, pseudo-silence – things are very, very subtle or the difference in dynamics between the average level in the recording and the maximum peak and the minimum is dramatic, the limits of what is audible, both in the recording or in a live performance. These I do and do to great lengths because I like contrast. The effects of contrast and the effects of dynamics and balance, to me this is very important. There’s also this process that has been happening and it took place mostly over the ‘90s of the so- called “loudness wars” in which production studios were applying compressors and different techniques of making commercial music sound louder and stronger for the radio broadcast. This is a process that not only took place in the production realm but also it takes place in live performances and festivals everywhere. Of course, there’s a risk in this, which is losing dynamics, losing contrast and losing strength because we don’t have the contrast. With contrast comes strength and strength in the impression you can create in the richness of the music, the performance you can create, and that relies dramatically on contrast. Silence is the extreme, the ultimate contrast you can have for sound, and you can use it in many different ways. I think it’s obvious it’s a fundamental part of music, you can use it in all kinds of music. I’ve used silence in extreme ways, for example, like streaming 10 minutes of silence in the middle of a piece. This creates feelings of void and wondering, checking levels and checking equipment sometimes, but this is not my intention: My intention is to have that as a fundamental component of the music. The most typical reaction I’ve seen to that is the idea that there’s something conceptual when you use silence. Every time you use silence it seems somehow – because there’s a tradition and a history of the use of silence – that it is conceptual. In my case, I’m not trying to make any statement about void in music or any John Cage-ian statement, but the opposite. To me, it’s a fundamental block of the making of sound and probably the clearest way of showing that is as an agent of contrast and dynamics.

Todd L. Burns

In 2001, you wrote down a bunch of aphorisms about music and process and things and you put it on your website. They’re all just one-line things, and a lot of them are really, really interesting. One that struck me quite a bit was, “I work really hard to create useless things and I’m proud of it.” So you’ve created a lot of useless things in your career.

Francisco López

I hope so. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

Why do you hope so?

Francisco López

I mean useless in the sense of not having a clear application, not having a clear intention, not having a clear meaning or expression or reason why those things are put out in the world. Useless in that sense. As a contrast to a lot of work that has been put forward or presented as advancing something in the realm of music, for example, technically or aesthetically. So perhaps useless in a philosophical sense, in the sense of creating this unknown purpose, unknown use for this thing that I have no control of. So it was in the context of having no control or having expression or no expression with what you do.

Todd L. Burns

What was happening in 2001 that you put down all these thoughts?

Francisco López

I was working in Cuba and if you work in Cuba you become philosophical. [laughter] I can guarantee it to anyone. If you travel as a tourist, probably not. But if you work in Cuba and if you live like a Cuban, definitely you are bound to become philosophical.

Todd L. Burns

You’ve traveled quite a bit, as you mentioned. You really don’t seem to have much of a home base. Is this a conscious choice, a philosophical choice?

Francisco López

Philosophical, personal choice, yes definitely. I mentioned before that I’m not a gear-oriented person; well, I’m not an object-oriented person. I have problems with physical objects. I have psychological problems with material things. It’s not that I don’t like things, it’s taht I don’t want to possess things. In fact, the more I like something the more I like somebody else to have it and possess it and to be responsible for it. I don’t want to be responsible for physical things. Probably that’s my lack of responsibility or something like that, but that’s probably why I’m also so drawn to sound. Sound is immaterial in its physical manifestation and, at the same time, it’s such a powerful thing, such a powerful force, such a physical thing. But it might be immaterial. It’s always somewhere in its physical support but we don’t need to carry – especially today in the material level we’re reaching, which allows us to bring sounds and music in very small physical things. We don’t even need to carry them, they’re there in the cloud or whatever. So they’re somewhere but the amount of space and physical presence they require is much less than paintings or sculpture, for example. And to me this is a blessing, this is definitely a blessing. And this has to do with my allergy to material things.

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, CDs have been an enormous carrier of information for you. You put out vinyl and you’ve done cassettes as well. Is there an optimum format or does it just depend on the release in your mind?

Francisco López

It really depends on the release. I did a lot of cassette releases a long time ago and cassettes are coming back, of course. It’s happening and I imagine that there will be a resurrection of cassettes. But I think there’s a resurrection of formats, or a combination of new formats and very old formats for reasons that have nothing to do with music, but with other things: nostalgia sometimes, by fascination with the object or the technology. Each one of these today, if I do something it will have to be adapted to the format – this vinyl release, for example, it’s basically made with scratch of sounds from vinyls. So each one of these formats allows you to do different things and I think it’s great to react to the medium that you have. CDs today are basically like a remnant of an industry that is not an industry anymore. It was never an industry for experimental music, that’s for sure. But it’s only people who are interested in experimental music, mostly, or electronic music that have an interest in the physical support. Vinyl, of course, the coolness and appeal of vinyl, that’s a different story. Perhaps a few years from now CDs will have also some kind of appeal, they’re already having this appeal of something old. We are in this situation.

Todd L. Burns

You don’t seem a very nostalgic type of person.

Francisco López

No, I’m not. I’m always thinking of what I’m doing now or what I’m doing next, normally.

Todd L. Burns

You have how many projects in the works right now? Every time I seem to read an interview with you there’s 20 to 30...

Francisco López

In the making? I work in parallel with many projects, that’s the way I like to work. There are maybe 20 or 30 different projects that are in the making. Some of them are collaborations, some are field recordings in different countries. I’m working with cartoons right now. Cartoon sounds. I like to work in parallel with different projects so I can have a variety of things that I do at the same time. That, I think, is the result of each one of them.

Todd L. Burns

What is the cartoon project?

Francisco López

It’s a project with a filmmaker from Montréal and he got permission to use the soundtracks – including everything, dialogue, sound effects, everything – from old cartoons from the ‘10s, the ‘20s and the ‘30s, which are on the national film archive in Canada.

Todd L. Burns

I read, and correct me if I’m wrong, that your first interest in music came from watching a puppet show and the strange sounds that were... or is that internet lies?

Francisco López

No, that’s not really from that episode, but as a kid I had an interest in puppets. I don’t know why, but they had this magical combination of being present somehow and the mystery of the puppet show. A bunch of puppet shows I saw as a kid were not for kids, so it was not really entertaining, it was more mysterious, scary. This to me was perhaps this other world that was happening there that was alive, that was independent and self-contained. Again, it’s this idea of another world that I always felt very keen on and well-connected with other worlds. So it was this analog simulation of a different reality with storytelling that was driving me towards... not so much the music but this connection with the creation of self-contained worlds.

Todd L. Burns

With Untitled you’re up to 275 and you have probably 20 to 30 more projects. What haven’t you done that you are looking forward to that you need to get done at this point?

Francisco López

One thing that always happens to me every time I start recording a new project is that I always get surprised. My way of working is never conceived by having a plan, but it always depends on the sounds themselves. When that happens and when you start combining or transforming or mixing the sounds, you always get surprises. Especially if you don’t have a plan beforehand, which is my case. So every single time I get surprised by things I imagine that will happen in the process. To me, it’s very difficult to predict or expect. What I would like to happen is this process of surprise and discovery. A few things, it keeps going the same way and so far, until today, keeps being the same thing. Now I discover new things, I look for other things that I wasn’t looking for before, but as a process of discovery it still happens today. So my hope is that it continues like this forever.

Todd L. Burns

Do you find yourself, though, descending into formula? Doing three or four releases where you think, “Oh, I’ve kind of done that process over and over again”? Or is it the sound project different that you’re working on so it’s always a different end product and even the same formula ends up with something radically different?

Francisco López

It’s interesting to compare the parameters to judge change in music for one artist or one band compared to the work of other realms of creation of art, like painting. In painting, a painter is never expected to produce a completely different painting every time he does a painting. He’s expected to paint as himself or herself in his own style, evolving over the years – yes, perhaps – but he’s not expected to produce a completely different thing every week. In music there’s this myth, this paradigm of constant dramatic brutal restless novelty, every month, every week, every release, every album, every person. I don’t think we can create so many things. I don’t think we can create a new style of music every week. I don’t think we as individuals or as groups of people, as bands, we cannot create something completely different every single release. This is a myth, it doesn’t happen. When you compare albums by the same people, they might be trying to do different things but it doesn’t happen. But my question is: Why are we expecting this, exactly? It’s unclear to me. I think the work I admire from different people, might be painters or artists, one of the things I appreciate is consistency, a solid body of work somehow. With that vision then to me the question is not so much novelty. It’s more what is this consistency of the world that you’re constructing block by block, step by step, piece by piece? This is the way I see myself mostly. So, of course, I repeat the things I do. I repeat the strategy, the taste, a lot of the things that are clearly my style of doing things, and that style comes from a lot of influences.

In terms of releases, for example, there’s an imbalance between the pace of creation of somebody and the pace of the commercial possibility of marketing. Of course, this is not a business in terms of how many releases can you put out by different labels in one year. Then there’s always this myth that if somebody’s putting out a lot of releases and quickly, then they don’t have quality and it would be better to have less, but with more quality. I don’t see this. I’m not talking about myself right now, but other artists. I see artists who produce very little and it’s not really interesting. And I see artists who produce a lot and every single thing they do has something interesting. Whether or not they change is another matter, but it’s always interesting. I know some artists that record every day. I know artists that are compulsive in their interest and they’re not concerned at all with production in terms of releases. But they record every single day and they have thousands and thousands of hours of recordings and creations. And I think every person has a different pace. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to follow a specific pace, to have to do 10, 20, 30 albums a year; no, it’s not important. What is important, and what is very difficult, is to discover what is your pace and is your pace independent of any commercial, social considerations. You should follow that pace. Now, if you can then release what you’ve created, it’s a different story. But I think you should create at your own pace. And you have to – and this is one of the most difficult things to do – discover what is your good pace of creation.

Todd L. Burns

I want to end it before we open it up to questions from the audience with a potentially stupid question. What makes a good field recording?

Francisco López

The eye of the beholder, that’s what makes a good field recording. Some artists work with very lo-fi ways of approaching field recordings and I’m not, I think I made this clear, interested in representation. My job is not to do what they call a perfect field recording because I don’t know what a perfect field recording is, I have no idea what that is. What some people mean by it is different. A sound technician working for a nature documentary, for example, will have an idea of what a perfect sound recording is. An artist will have a completely different idea. There’s no such thing as an objective recording of something that is real; this doesn’t exist. But also, you have to relate that question to your intentions, your desires and your feelings.

Todd L. Burns

What makes a good field recording to you?

Francisco López

I don’t know, because every time I do a field recording I...

Todd L. Burns

The intention is always different for yourself?

Francisco López

The intention is not there when I’m doing the recording. The recording itself is the exploration of the first mining of things, substance from reality, and I don’t know what will happen with that in the future. So when I’m doing the recording it’s unclear to me. I might have a preference for certain sounds, of course; every person has a different preference. I may be drawn to certain things – this sounds good to me, so I record it. But it’s unclear what I’m going to do. I can work, and have worked, with recordings with very simple technology. In fact, what I use today for recording sound is just a Zoom recorder, which as most of you know, is a very cheap recorder that I think now is €150. It records in four tracks but it’s extremely simple, cheap, and that’s what I use for field recordings. By no means is this a professional recorder, but I will challenge any professional recorder to tell me after the production and after the piece is done to compare qualities, even from the technical point of view of the sound.

Todd L. Burns

Thank you. I want to open it up to questions if anyone has one.

Audience Member

Hi, from what I understand of your philosophy towards your recordings, marrying your sound with film would almost be blasphemous. But would you ever consider working with a filmmaker, maybe doing something collaborative?

Francisco López

The second part of your question is the key: making something collaborative. When you work with filmmakers – and I’ve worked with filmmakers and with dancers; it’s not the normal work that I do, but occasionally I’ve done it – and my impression is that it’s always the same problem. What do you do when you work with sound and images, especially in film? It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s always the soundtrack to the film and that’s not what I call a collaboration. Also, film has this military hierarchy that is very clear and the director of the film is the boss, the supreme person in the making of the film. If you do a collaboration, hand to hand – close, intimate collaboration, real collaboration. I’m not talking about putting sound to images. I’m talking about taking decisions for the images and the structure of the images according to the sounds and so on, back and forth. If you do that in the context of film, you’re gonna have a hard time having your name at the same level as the film director. This is not about, “I want to be here too.” This is about, “Is this a real collaboration or not?” This is a problem that happens too much in film, that is not so much related to the medium, but the tradition of the presentation of the medium through film. And I have had this problem a few times. So it’s not so much that I worry about not having the name in the same size of letters as the director’s, it’s not about that. It’s that there’s no acknowledgement that the making of the thing was a process where the images could’ve been influenced by sound, and vice versa.

Audience Member

So would you be more willing to do something maybe uncredited for both parties, maybe do it under a pseudonym for both?

Francisco López

That’s a possible solution. But the problem here is not working with a person – you might have a very good understanding with the person who is the film person. It’s more the industry’s cultural environment, the way it’s presented. Any time there’s a film being screened, there’s the film director and then there’s all the other things. And it’s very difficult that you convince or you present or you show that the work has been done, even if you put it very clearly, it’s very difficult to make it understood that way. So it’s more the context of the presentation of film that makes it difficult. [applause]

Audience Member

Hi, first of all respect to your very deep knowledge of sound. I just really want to know, in the entire universe, all of the sound, so all these different sounds around us. So is there any standard for you? Is there a good sound, or a bad sound or something interesting? I just want to know.

Francisco López

Good or bad sound or songs?

Audience Member

What kind of sound is interesting for you, gives pleasure to you so you want to know more about it?

Francisco López

You can look at this question in different ways, because sometimes what you hear in the sounds is what you’re feeling at the moment. And sometimes, with experience, what you hear in the sounds is the potential of something. Sometimes when you’re listening to something or recording something, you’re imagining the potential of something. That’s not there as it is in the sound, but then you can say, “OK, with this I can do this or that.” Then you start imagining it. Then the answer will be different depending on how you’re dealing with those things. In general, I’m interested in any sounds and I’ve recorded all kinds of things really. My experience is in the studio and probably most of you have that knowledge and the different transformations you can do of sounds will allow you to go in many different territories. And the potential of this substance is there for many different types of things. The only thing that I think is important, and to answer your question, is that I try as much as I can to look at those things, to hear those things, as much as I can out of the cultural and natural context, to hear them as sounds, which is a very difficult thing to do. This brings you into a completely different realm. For example, I have no fascination – this is a common thing – for fascinating sounds because of the source of the sounds. A lot of people get fascinated, for instance, by an animal making a sound that sounds electronic. The cicada from Japan, for example. The cicadas there make these incredible sounds that sound like electronic music. It’s incredible because it’s a cicada. OK, that’s a fact, and that is a surprise and that is an acknowledgement of the fascination of this thing in reality. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I try to separate myself from this level of fascination into a different level. In that other level I don’t care where the sounds are coming from and when the sounds are out there, they can be sounds. There’s no such thing as the sound of a frog, if you know what I mean.

Audience Member

Also, another one. You played some of your stuff before and some of it sounded really interesting. Some of the producers in this room might want to know, if they’re interested in sampling your sound to make some music would that be a problem?

Francisco López

No, just a bunch of money and I’ll leave it up to anybody. [laughter]

Audience Member

Thank you.

Francisco López

No, I haven’t got any money, I still have to get some money from samples. It’s a joke.

Audience Member

I have two questions, I don’t know which one to ask first. As far as your first experience recording live nature sounds in the rainforest, when did you decide in your mind that, “I should share this with people”? When did you develop this crazy system of blindfolding people and sitting them round playing them what you’ve experienced?

Francisco López

It’s something that happened over the years, step by step. The final configuration with the arrangement with the system, with the blindfolds, and it happened by learning from experience in performances and by struggling also with the possibilities of presentation. You always have to struggle with this, particularly in music environments. It’s a paradox also that theater or art environments are sometimes also, in terms of reconfiguration of space and changing those rules, much more flexible than music environments. I’ve seen graphic equalizers for control of sound blocked and locked so I couldn’t access them in a club for music. I can understand why, but to me this is crazy. So I had to struggle with all these different restrictions and try to bring in the elements one by one until more or less it’s this configuration that is viable and still evolving. And it depends on the space. I started being able to do performances in the early ‘90s and very quickly I got into trying to build these elements, very quickly in the early ‘90s.

Audience Member

My last question is it feels as if a lot of the sounds are kind of transcendent, kind of spiritual in a sense. Have you ever been interviewed and been asked about how you feel emotionally about being able to spread it and do you feel spiritual when you listen to it and when you produce it?

Francisco López

Definitely, yeah, I think you hit an important point. To me, it is a spiritual activity fundamentally. I’m not a religious person in any specific particular religion sense, but definitely to me music, sound in general, is an extremely powerful force that is obviously connected in the entire history of humankind with spiritual realms in many different ways. To me, it has the potential of spiritual transformation, whatever that means. I also see that happens to a number of people in performances in a number of sound installations in a very strong way. It definitely has a very strong spiritual component, yes.

Audience Member

I was quite interested with this blindfolding. It’s something that I’ve been fascinated with myself a number of times, just to stop somewhere and close your eyes, like, if you’re just walking in the street. One thing I’ve noticed, in my hometown there are trams, and in the winter in the snow, the audio without all the resonance that comes from the hard surface normally, just to experience this is really cool. I had this experience with a floatation tank. Have you been in contact with this? [Francisco López nods] Is it something you’ve been working with for performances?

Francisco López

No, because I tried floatation tanks in three different places in three different systems, so I saw them. My impression was one of extremely limited possibilities. One is obviously the soundsystems they have, when they have soundsystems, the speakers are crappy and really horrible, the sound is terrible so that’s really useless. And my other experience – and this happened every time – is that you’re drifting when you’re floating, very slowly, you’re very slowly drifting. So when you’re floating there and you don’t feel your body and so on, you’re very slowly drifting and over half an hour you end up touching one side of the chamber. Then if you push a little bit away from this side, in a matter of time, maybe half an hour, you will touch the other end. So my mind was basically busy with this idea of trying to forget the actual environment. It was not an environment that was that good, really, for a number of reasons. Also, you could hear a lot of sounds coming from outside. For somebody who is aware of sound, you hear a lot of stuff coming from outside. So there are a number of limitations in the floatation tank. I think it is interesting, the aspect of getting your body the same temperature and so on. There are some elements there that will help to go into that direction, but there are other elements that don’t really allow the experience to go much further than that. So I was a bit disappointed by the experience.

Audience Member

In a way it’s the extreme void of input from the environment around you kind of makes you more aware of... also the sensory of everything else, than just sitting blindfolded.

Francisco López

I think that’s why commitment is so important. Commitment and awareness of what you’re trying to achieve. Of course, if you have a blindfold you might feel the blindfold in your face, things like that. You’re sitting down, you could be laying down, it doesn’t matter how you do it, you can always be aware of that experience. I think what is crucial is that you have to be in the mood and with the intention and this has to be intentional, conscious and active. If you want to do meditation you have to do it actively. You need to learn and you have to do it actively and you need to practise it. And this requires training and effort and so on. This is equivalent in that sense and that’s why it’s possible to do meditation anywhere anytime.

Audience Member

At the start you talked about other worlds and other realities. Do you see yourself as exploring or revealing an existing world when you’re recording sound and then manipulating it, or is the point to create an entirely different world? Is it accessing a real other reality or is it creating another real reality?

Francisco López

This is like the metaphor that some sculptures used: The form’s already there and the materials, we just bring it out. This is a very old idea actually about creation and art. It’s always been there as the discussion in the history of creation. I suppose it is within that entire big question that we’re talking about here, meaning that I don’t believe I’m creating an entirely new thing; what I’m trying to do with that substance from reality – it is connected, obviously, in terms of the materiality, or the materials that I’m using. It’s also connected in terms of the structure. One of the things that’s important to consider when working with field recordings isn’t actually what people call samples or sounds. There’s no such thing as sound as an individual entity, especially from the point of view of the machines. For machines there’s no sounds, there’s a constant flow of sonic information and there’s no difference between different individual entities. But what I’m trying to say is that there is a connection with that world, but what I’m trying to do is to work in a way that is not representational. It doesn’t need representation, it’s not aimed at representation and therefore it can have its own separate life connected to reality, obviously. But the aim of this creation is to generate something that has a little life on its own, let’s put it that way. If you want to be modest, there’s a little new world that I’ve created. It’s connected, of course, and it’s related to many different things, but my aim is to generate this thing. And this little thing also aims to be a territory of exploration for others. So it’s not itself a final thing, it’s an open gate into a territory, and this is the way I like to see it and the way I try to do it. When somebody else enters that territory, whether a listener or someone experienced in this sound, then it is the responsibility of this person to create in that territory. I’m one of those people who believe the mental act of creation, when it comes to sound or music is not producing sound, it’s listening to sound. So the creation act, it’s generated and it’s produced and not finalized but it keeps going on with that listening. Then, what is the creation? I’m not sure. But I try to create a blank territory that you can enter and in that sense it’s a little different world you can explore and go in.

Audience Member

So the creative act is almost walking through the door.

Francisco López

This is my belief to some extent. Of course, this is not an objective door, it’s not neutral and it couldn’t be. But I’m offering this particular subjective door that will lead somewhere. But then I don’t know what this territory is, that’s my point.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

The first piece you played was about 70 minutes in total, I believe. I’m just wondering if you’re interested in these concepts of vertical time or non- linear-type music and perhaps what is the longest session or piece that you’ve worked on?

Francisco López

If you work with structures of generating or combining sound that are basically endless – like today you can do generative things or whatever – then it’s endless. Some of the installations that I showed images of, they basically have sound sources that are endless. It depends on the time of the installation.

Audience Member

I have a second question. There was a slide that was on the screen briefly with a bunch of blindfolded performers – I think I saw a violinist, a pianist, a guitarist perhaps. I was wondering if you could talk to us about that.

Francisco López

This is an ensemble, the Maarten Altena Ensemble from Amsterdam, with whom I worked recently. I did a composition for them blindfolded so the musicians have to play blindfolded. Obviously, there’s no score, but also there’s no visual cues they can follow. So what happens here is this composition was not improvised, it was not random. I did a lot of work with all the musicians, I had the time to work with them. Then the composition is made for them according to their possibilities, their styles, their ways of playing, and we did a lot of work in terms of hiding the cues for change, sometimes a very radical change, in the music that weren’t audible for the audience unless you know the piece very, very well and unless you know every single element that is happening, which would be basically impossible. So it’s turning the whole structure of cues, visual cues, written cues, bringing those cues into the music. Then it’s audible for the musicians who know the piece and then they’ll know how to change. This is one of the things I was interested in creating, sudden changes, surprising changes in the music. Again, contrast – and that was one of the important elements in this composition. So because they were blindfolded they had to be listening to each other very, very carefully.

Audience Member

Great, thank you.

Audience Member

I’m interested in your use of spatialization, and you place yourself in the center so you can hear more or less what the audience is hearing. But one of the difficulties in working in spatializing sound is that, generally speaking, the center is the sweet spot and people sitting on the outer edges will usually have a bias to a speaker in front of them. Do you have performance methods to try to create an overall even experience for all of the listeners?

Francisco López

The center is the sweet spot only if the music is designed that way. And that’s an idea that comes, at least partly, from film, from soundsystems designed for film. Because you have a focal point of attention and then you have things around that. In music it has to do with the idea that things are going to move around a fixed position. Anyway, my strategy, the things that I do in live performance are not designed and they don’t take place with one point of reference. There’s a play and that play is free in the sense that I can do things that move around in different ways without that single point of reference. That’s my point of listening and it’s referenced only in terms of what I can hear, because I cannot move in this case. But only in that sense. So the actual composition or the performance is not based on only one ideal space for the listening experience. For example, my recordings are not multichannel recordings set up in the way I play them and then they happen in the soundsystem. I’ve never done this, in fact. But they’re flexible and then I can move them around in the space. So somebody who’s sitting on the edge can have a great listening experience because that person is receiving at certain points better listening than other people sat on the other side. And so on. This also applies even for sound installations, in which the automaton for the sound installation – if there is such a thing – will be not one single point in the space where that will be ideal. And that was the case with this installation, for example. So here there was a center but the center was not the best place for listening. It depends when in the performance there were points that were better than others. So I worked with this because in this case I’m not working with a piece that is designed as such.

Todd L. Burns

A couple over there. Just have three more, I think.

Audience Member

I was out of the room for five minutes so if you’ve already answered a variant of this question I apologize. Are your ears constantly searching for sounds? Do you find yourself in everyday situations – for example, you go to a supermarket, and whereas most of us in a supermarket, we’re shopping, whereas for you it’s an orchestra of sounds?

Francisco López

That sounds like the film The Man with the X-Ray Vision and in the end he goes crazy because he’s got this constant... [waving his hand in his ear, suggesting constant noise] No, it’s not like that. Thank god it’s not like that because a man who’s in that position will go crazy. But it is true that many times in the most unexpected situations or places you might find something that nobody will notice or will think is irrelevant and then you’re, “Oh this is incredible, this little thing sound.” Typically it’s little things, because the big things you notice and the little things are something less obvious. But I’m not the only one, I know a lot of musicians who have this kind of listening. They’re, “Oh, this is a very nice thing here,” so I suppose it’s related to working with sound, but you cannot carry on like that for 24 hours.

Audience Member

We’ve have some great insight into your thoughts on the music you make, your process and everything, but I’m also interested in your thoughts on the music you don’t make – like popular music – both in terms of recording and performance. Where do you see it going, where do you like to see it going and do you think it’s converging or diverging from the music you make?

Francisco López

I have to say I’m very bad at making predictions, and every time I make a prediction I always get it wrong. Not that I care if I make a wrong prediction, but I don’t really know. My impression today is that there’s a convergence in terms of the mix and the cross rating in between different territories. This is definitely clear, and it’s happening on a massive scale and has been happening on a massive scale for a number of years. So there’s definitely this crossbreeding and this influence that goes back and forth. You see it in a lot of pop music, for example, commercial music. You hear things today that would’ve been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Completely unthinkable. So that is clear, this influence, this little thing, little detail in the music. For some pop artists it’s more than a little thing. There’s also another question that goes the other way around, which is a lot of the people working in experimental music today, their background is not academic. They didn’t go to study in conservatories or their equivalent. Their background is rock & roll, pop music in a wide sense. This is my background, actually. And because of that, their way of doing things, the aesthetics, the directions, the ideas, sometimes the flexibility, sometimes the speed of change and doing things is completely different and is fed by this background. This, to me, is crucial because in my view the most interesting experimental music being done today is being done by people without any proper musical training. This is very important because it means something quite fundamental. Actually, this has never happened before in the history of music-making, or it happened a long time ago and then we lost it in the process. Perhaps we’re recovering it in this stage thanks to the paradoxical combination of this access to technology. It’s not only the technology. It’s also that socially today it’s accepted that anyone doing something, at least you can do it. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, but at least they let you do it. There was a time – and I lived through it – when you couldn’t really do it. You will have no chance of presenting or showing or whatever. And this I think is more important than anything else, because it means we’re in the middle of a massive social process of change and this is out of the hands of anybody controlling the direction and I definitely see that as a social process. So I don’t know where it’s going but I definitely feel that, thank God, music is out of the grip of professional musicians and composers.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

You were talking earlier about the surprise and the unexpected. Is that an important element in the process of getting closer to a more real reality?

Francisco López

I’m not sure. The unexpected has many different manifestations, or different realms. One could be what you find in the so-called real world, and that is unexpected. Then there’s more unexpected things. I find more unexpected things... when I’m off that world, when I’m in the other virtual world of transformation, creation in the studio or whatever, I find more unexpected things in that world. But that is perhaps because I’ve done a lot of exploration of the first world. Then in the second world there’s always new things. And it’s not technological. To me, this is interesting because the technology it uses is actually very simple, and I don’t believe we have generated with all the technological changes, software for example, I don’t see a lot of changes in sound. It definitely doesn’t go in parallel with the changes in software. The changes in software are dramatic; the speed of things, the number of things, the number of possibilities, the parameters, the ranges, everything. It’s dramatic, brutal, gigantic. Now, what can you get with that in terms of change in sound? I don’t see that much change, because there’s a limit for the hearing, there’s a limit for a number of things and you can go into other territories that don’t have to do with sound, that have to do with other things, with meaning, with context, with how you place the sounds and so on. So there’s a limitation for the unexpected in technical terms and it has to come more from the way you tweak with those things. Then unexpected can be for you, maybe not for somebody else. But to me, what is interesting, in short, is how is it possible? I wonder, that I can be surprised and find these unexpected things when the tools that I’m using are the same tools? They’ve been the same tools for quite a long time. Now the process of this happening with the unexpected is still going on.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Todd L. Burns

Thank you very much, Francisco.