FRANCISCO
LOPEZ PERFORMANCE
[15-04-05]
Lopez's highly processed environmental recordings have a style of their own, and his performance was a definite highlight of this year's festival.
Francisco Lopez
"I heard about the festival before but this is
the first time I'm here. I'm curious about the film programme
so I'll check some things out tomorrow. Occasionally I do visuals
but I don't want the audience to know what I'm doing or see
the equipment so the darkness serves several purposes at the
same time. The whole point is the get people really immersed
in the sound.
I
feel satisfied with the show, there was a good match between
the sound system and
the room. I'm happy with the result. The system allows
me to have a lot of flexibility for working with the space
and the sounds and getting people into the sound world
I'm trying to create."
Audience member |
The setup: "There
is a surround system, meaning speakers all around the
room in a circle outside of the seats for the audience.
And I'm performing in the middle of the seats in order
to be able to control the circle but the audience is
facing the speakers and I provide blind folders so
the performance happens in complete darkness. The idea
of this is to have a very intense focus and a very
intense concentration with the sound in the space.
What I do with the sound in the performance is with
a lot of things that help me do the mixing and processing
of the sound. I use the sounds based on filed recordings
that I do, and then process them in the studio and
then combining during the live performance in different
ways. All these materials from the point of view of
the audience are abstract sound materials that become ‘sound
creatures' that are moving around in the space during
the performance." |
It s a human basic need of connecting perception with the use of reality. The way we move around the world. That happens with sound and that happens with images as well.. You have to do it in an active way to move beyond the normal perception of the world. If you hear a frog, it is almost impossible not to imagine a frog. The more clear the sound representation of the real thing, the more difficult it is to move away from that automatic natural connection with the real world.
Lopez talks about his work at Lovebytes 05
There
are many things we heard last night that sound like something
unreal.
The more you move away from the representation in the listening,
the more you will discover what is the real nature of the
sound, the real texture, the real features. You can do
this with any sound but of course it's much easier to do
it with the sounds that people say are abstract. I'm interested
in the detachment of sound, because when you detect those
things, you are dealing with a different wall of perception.
The sound of a frog, it doesn't belong to a frog anymore
after it has been produced and its possible to listen to
the sound and not imagine a frog, and I'm interested in
that."
David Newman
" It was very peaceful, I slept through most of the works, it was
like the weather…I enjoyed it though." |
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Francisco Lopez at Lovebytes
Lopez talks about his work and the performance
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Stills from talk |
Jim Baghouse
"It was really immersive experience, really disorientating, I wasn't blind folded because I was recording but even so, being in almost near darkness and seeing people in flashes of light occasionally, the entire room full of blindfolded people, strange. Sonically there were some ½ recognizable
sound shifting into one another, it worked really well." |
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