Anomalous Records, USA 02/2001	Francisco López | Michael Northam – "belle confusion 0247" (CD – .absolute.[seattle] 2000) Five years ago an exchange began between Francisco López and Michael Northam – elements shared from a similar perspective into the internal dynamics of sound as a possibility to refine perceptual awareness. Utilizing individual systems designed to articulate complex sound material, López and Northam have always shared an important thread towards the creation of immersive sound spaces. Their contrasting routes towards realization – López with his 'absolute' limitless exploration of sound as raw material – and Northam with his fragile electro-acoustic based sound organisms – creates a tension between abstraction and harmonically rich intensity enfolding in this López's first interpretation of this special sound dialogue.
The Wire, UK 2001	Francisco López | Michael Northam – "belle confusion 0247" (.absolute.[seattle] 001–00) Francisco López | Amy Denio – "belle confusion 00" (.absolute.[seattle] 002–00) In his proposal for an 'absolute concrete music', Francisco López seeks transcendence through the sonic immersion in a swarming mass of detail, including the physicality of silence, the rainforests of South America and Death Metal's propulsive blast beats. The two latest contributions to hisongoing 'Belle Confusion' series are collaborative efforts, one with fellow field recording artist Michael Northam, the other with avant saxophonist Amy Denio. Even with his collaborations López has succeeded in pushing forth his resistance to procedures, craftmanship and semantics. What gets left behind are paradoxically both ominous and serene compositions of openended mysteries to be researched and investigated by the audience as they see it. While 'belle confusion 00' uses Denio's voice as the basic sound material, López and Denio have built a haunted grey drone from the complex harmonics of a human voice that never utters anything except its own somatic textures. Their collaboration begins with a mirage-like sound of undefinable yet delicate fluctuations, then a silence followed by a slow tectonic rumble of similar sounds to the first interlude but much less friendly, and then another silence. It almost seems as if López has stretched out two brief syllables from Denio's voice over the course of an hour. Yet 'belle confusion 0247' with Michael Northam may be the strongerof the two. Northam and López began an exchange four years ago, which had also resulted in Northam's appearance on the Staalplaat release of López's 'untitled (1993)'. For this album, the two apply a considerable amount of pressure to their processed field recordings which gradually increase from near silence to roaring floods of metallic noise and give way to a hovering buzz from an indeterminate, timestretched echo, started by almost imperceptible tinklings of wooden objects. Silence, of course, plays a large role in both of these pieces, marking the shifts in time and space to the extended dronescapes. If one is to embrace the acousmatic experience that López requests for most of his live shows by volunteering to be blindfolded, López's silences can be unnerving in their sheer lack of perceptibility. Within both of these collaborations, López employs silence to put the brakes on his slow turning movements of sound which have an uncanny ability to alter the perception of time. During the listening experience, these droning sounds appear to crawl forward into infinity. Yet when López crops the volume down to silence or near silence, his more audible elements seem only to take up five minutes of time when more than an hour has passed. Quite simply awesome.
Anomalous Records, USA 02/2001	Francisco López | Amy Denio – "belle confusion 00" (CD – .absolute.[seattle] 2000) Amy Denio and Francisco López are devoted sound explorers with extended roots in (and deep commitment to) the underground experimental community. Over the years they have created, refined and developed their personal sonic worlds. 'Belle Confusion 00' is the amazing confluence of these worlds. The basic sound material of the piece –recorded between December 1999 and September 2000– consists entirely of Amy Denio's voice, recorded in various places – the standing-wave generating stairwell in her home, the massive underground (and empty) water cistern at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, WA, as well as in concert with Francisco López in Boulder, CO; Los Angeles, CA; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Unlike most voice-based works, 'Belle Confusion 00' explores the most essential sonic properties and nuances of the original material and turns it into a thrilling immersive trip complete with deafening silence, intense layerings, and out-of-this world harmonic excursions. A must for the fans of these two worlds and for those of the new one.
The Sound Projector, UK 07/2001	Francisco López | Amy Denio – "Belle Confusion 00" (CD .absolute.[seattle], 2000) Francisco López | Michael Northam – "Belle Confusion 0247" (CD .absolute.[seattle], 2000) A brace of excellent new recordings on López's new label .Absolute., which (reflecting his very mobile lifestyle) has branches in Osaka, NYC, London and Seattle. These releases reached me through Anomalous. Belle Confusion 00 is one which you may as well try and absorb in its entirety. Though episodic, it's all one long track; a series of different recordings from locations around the world, treated and escalated to unbearably clear and terrifying levels of volume – sequenced together with loooong passages of absolute silence. Making it to the end of these silent tracts requires the stamina of a Marathon runner – it's possibly the record-listening equivalent of crossing the desert. When sounds imperceptibly begin to re-emerge from the silence after their long vacation, you're so grateful for them it's like a droplet of water to a man dying of thirst. Then again, maybe the porridge-like consistency of these soaring airplane-motor drones can get a bit too intense to endure after a while. Not to mention that intensely sad sequence, where the sounds are so attenuated and wretched you can hardly bear to observe their meager existence; it's like seeing tiny emaciated tortoises drying up in the sun. So the listener starts to crave the next passage of silence, simply as a blessed relief. As we're pitched back and forth between these two extremes, the work starts to acquire a simple pattern of tension, a series of structural oppositions, one of which cancels out the other. It's like exploring a very strange terrain from the air, without a map of flight plan, where two conditions prevail: we're either completely lost in the fog, or looking down on a near-empty plain through the clouds. Not every listener will welcome this kind of 'belle confusion' into their private brain-space, and this kind of systematic and extreme experimentation not only plays hob with your expectations, it also appears to offer little in the way of normal enjoyment. However, if you can adapt yourself to its slow pace and learn to glean what you can from the imperceptible movements upon its micro-structural surface, then I daresay you would then be equipped to endure any hardship or deprivation that life might have to throw at you. And that includes anything from a bout of insomnia, to long stretches of loneliness, starvation, life in prison, or being accidentally buried alive. And if you think some of those scenarios sound implausible, then you should come and visit my house sometime. Maybe we all need a bout of 'belle confusion' to develop a more meaningful relationship with the vagaries of the universe. ...the Mnortham disc isn't quite as compelling, lacking that push-pull dynamic of its sister CD, but only a captious listener could be seriously disappointed by it. Imagine the sound of church bells ringing across the English countryside, but you're 100 miles away and only a ghost of the clanging tone makes it across the wet and windy English weather. How your heart yearns to be the other side of the country, where the wedding or joyous service is taking place, but instead you're trapped in some dreary activity in a small village where nobody knows your name. Well, this approximates the feeling of distant longing evoked by these spectral timbres. The long tones mutate and shift gradually, acquiring strange new tonal values, and gaining something in intensity while losing an awful amount in terms of volume. The sad sounds drift away into the wind. Whether you can capture every last dying moment might depend on the effectiveness of your sound system. I estimate that there's about 40 minutes of this activity before a long silent stretch kicks in. Subsequent sound passages are, if anything, even more attenuated and sad; a will-o-the-wisp blowing from one speaker to another. You'll be straining your ears to catch anything, forcing your imagination to perceive something that is barely there...but how refreshed your senses will be. You may end up cancelling that booking at the avant-garde movie festival, because somehow the prospect of watching that film of clear acetate passing through a projector is just too gosh-darned busy.
Turbid, USA 08/2001	Francisco López | Zbigniew Karkowski – "Whint" (double CD – .absolute.[london], 2001) It comes to you in a plain plastic jewel case. Then again maybe it doesn't, as there are only 954 of these double CD's from López' floating label, Absolute. This release, facilitated by London based label Touch, brings together one long piece from each composer, constructed with only white noise as a source material. Karkowski's massive rumbling slow motion hurricane force white disc is the more immediately impressive of the two. With only white noise to manipulate, the soundfield is perhaps rather monochramatic, but there is no lack of action and the brightness and contrast controls are spun to their extremes. It starts out deceptively quietly and rises to a floor shaking crescendo before abruptly cutting off. Slowly high sonic swooshes pan from speaker to speaker. It continues with variations on these effects, and the dominant elements are a fairly constant deep bass drone and ever shifting mid to high end controlled bursts of noise. About halfway through it rises to obliterating whiteout, before the hurricane shifts to the calm eye for a while, with just a low pulse shadow left. Then slowly the whirlwind picks up again. Experience all the fun of an avalanche from the comfort of your armchair! On the black disc, Francisco López latterly takes things to minimal extremes with such low level white noise splinters and burnt out cold silhouette drones they're almost beyond perception. It starts out with a low level rumble like a busy motorway polluting the air in the distance. Suddenly the cars are driving right under the floorboards and smoke comes rising through the cracks! Soon the room is choking. López seems more content to let the same pitches drone away for much longer than on the comparatively teeming Karkowski piece, minutely dabbing more and more black into the sound picture. Your mum's vacuum cleaner never sounded so good! Around twelve minutes in there's an abrupt cut off and the listener is dropped into López' realm of microscopic sound shadows that redefine the word 'ambient' (could it be 'nonbient'?) and have the ears straining as babies howl, birds twitter and motors rumble outside. Six minutes later, gas leak hisses begin and careless matches are struck and blowtorches scorch the walls, then march rhythmically out the door and into the city, razing everything in their path. They fiddled with computers whilst the world burnt.
Vital Weekly, The Netherlands 08/2001	John Duncan | Francisco López – "NAV" (double CD – Allquestions / .absolute.[osaka], 2001) Francisco López | Zbigniew Karkowski – "Whint" (double CD – .absolute.[london], 2001) Two double CD's, two collaborations, one Francisco López. On both of these recent releases, we find one CD by López and one by his fellow collaborator, John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski. As far as I understand, one each production both work on the same sound material. Let's see how the approaches work. NAV-Gate is the López side of the work with John Duncan. In 51 minutes he paints us much silence, or better near silence, and sometimes more audible parts which occassionally rises out of the almost silence. It's almost perfect ambient music that is presented here. Soft drones, an occasional bump and towards the very last minute a more then audible sound. To even image where López gets his sounds from, is an impossible task. An airconditiong system, the humms of motors, or just a microphone hanging in an abonned village? It might all be possible, but López will not reveal anything, not in his music, not by writing about it. NAV-Flex is the Duncan part. Knowing John quite a bit as a composer of extremes, he moves here into the more subdued extremes, maybe it's the López influence? Larger sections in this one piece opus are very quiet, but not as extreme as López, but still... Another important difference is that Duncan works with various blocks of sound, lengthy indeed, but various blocks he puts together with cross fades, other then López who seems to work with just one piece of sound (but maybe not of course). It's hard to tell wether they both used the same sounds, but maybe that's of lesser importance... A likewise collaboration went between López and Karkowski. I think here the use the same material, and if I'm not mistaken it's either the amplification of hiss or a far away recording of the sea. López again plays a difficult thing with the listener with a few blocks of processed sound, but also large blocks in which hardly anything happens. If you crank up the volume in those parts, something is there and the parts that were already audible become very loud. I guess that's the idea. Karkowski on his side made a lot of sound treatments of the original recordings and paints us a very nice collage of these processings. Less noisy then some might expect, but more and more I think Karkowski's power lies in composing "softer" music. This work can easily be ranked to his best yet...
Ascolti Profondi, Italy 09/2001	John Duncan | Francisco López – "NAV" (double CD – Allquestions / .absolute.[osaka], 2001) With two names like these, it's guaranteed. The first of the two CD's, NAV-gate, presents López and Duncan chiselling vibrations that are often suspended at the limit of the audible, and it's true that playback via headphones brings discoveries to the ear that speakers not in a setting of total silence don't catch. The color of the sound seems dark, galactic, in a limbo that contains spirits now ready to make the leap to the center of the earth, to know once and for all the origin of its continuous tremors. A few percussive touches seperate the parts, and in the end you'll find yourself disoriented, needing to understand yet aware of invisible forces new to us. The second disk, NAV-FLEX, starts off from a sort of electroacoustic 'lightning', a dry flash of frequencies that start together as a chord, but then are divided, chasing each other and almost disappearing, only to return and show themselves in the distance, meteorites not flying wild but driven by the same great centripetal force that sent them out. It's a matter of choosing where to stand: through their work, there are artists who open the mind much more than a thousand books, thanks to a simple concept taken through analysis; John and Francisco are in this company. Otherwise, we can continue to memorize tracks taken from other writings, just to make ourselves look good... but we remain so very, very small.
www.touchingextremes.org 10/2004	Marc Behrens | Francisco López "a szellem álma" (double CD – .absolute.[Koblenz]) Find me, if you can, someone more intransigent in sonic research than Francisco López and Marc Behrens; I was sure in advance about the value of this 2-CD release and of course I didn't fail. Working on the same basic materials, namely recordings made at Frankfurt airport, Marc and Francisco put their definite personality stamp on the sound mass, directing the energy ejections as they please in a series of aural maps that mark silence with groundbreaking effluvia, finally arriving to inhabit it without our senses' complete approval. Behrens is more than happy to bring us right into a distorted overload: large parts of space are filled with snarling white noise and scathing frequencies, with long moments of almost total absence of sonic content to balance the yin/yang element of the composition. The same extreme measures of calmness are applied by López in his customary way: minutes of pure whisper-to-nothingness, the only sound is blood pressure in your ear and maybe a virtually inaudible hiss; then, a monstrous growth of perturbed audiovisuals is shown only to be completely burnt out by torrential insufflations of instabile laptop violence, bringing the whole to a clicking quasi-standstill – again.
All Music Guide, Canada 10/2004	Marc Behrens | Francisco López "a szellem álma" (double CD – .absolute.[Koblenz]) Some collaborations are just meant to happen, but it still took over two years for this one to see the light of day. A Szellam Álma is part of Francisco López's series of collaborative albums released on his wandering imprint .absolute. This particular item came out on .absolute.[koblenz], a division of Bernhard Günter's label Trente Oiseaux, one of Marc Behrens' main channels. A Szellam Álma is a two-CD set. Disc 1 features a 64-minute work in five parts by Behrens, composed from sound materials supplied by both artists. Disc 2 contains a single 74-minute track by López, again created from sound materials supplied by both parties. Whether these sound materials were the same or not is very hard to say and ultimately irrelevant. Traces of López's signature sounds (his white noise that is not quite white noise) and Behrens' soundshapes (shards) and pacing are found in both pieces, but in the end these two incarnations of A Szellam Álma are basically typical works for each composer. Behrens' piece is rudimentary at first, shifting between periods of silence and white noise, and grows increasingly complex, with the addition of strobbing clicks, more delicate shapes and softer forms of nondescript sound matter to the building blocks he uses, all arranged in a way that suggests an impressive architecture yet never quite reveals its nature. López's piece is another exercise in self-disappearance. His textures occupy the physical listening space, establishing an abstract sonic ecosystem that becomes so obvious-sounding it vanishes from the listener’s mind. Its presence is felt again only when it suddenly disappears. The prolonged silence that follows has the same effect: after a few seconds -- even minutes -- of waiting for the sound to reappear, the listener’s attention wanders off and forgets about the disc still spinning in the CD player, until a new texture claims back the space a few minutes later. From shortwave-like in-between broadcasts to the sound of a loudspeaker breathing, both sounds and silences are as puzzling and confounding as ever. Which can be good or bad, depending on your degree of exposure to López's modus operandi.
Vital Weekly, The Netherlands 11/2004	Marc Behrens | Francisco López "a szellem álma" (double CD – .absolute.[Koblenz]) So the first thing I wondered about upon seeing this title was if it is a real language from some obscure part of the northern Italian mountains or if it could actually be a part of the mysterious language that Behrens and López have developed during the years of their friendship. Anyway, I don't know what it means, so it could be either. The music is not so mysterious though, at least not in my book. One disc features five tracks by Behrens, varying in length from 8 to 18 minutes, the other disc one track of almost 74 minutes by López. Both use the same source material that they created together. Of course the results are very different from each other. To begin with, Behrens' compositions are shorter than López's piece. This may seem like an extremely obvious remark, but there is a fundamental difference in approach: initially López leans more towards the immersive, the piece beginning quite forceful and rapidly changing (for his standards), but slowing down after about twenty minutes. All sound goes down to a hum, declining steadily in volume. This part alone takes 15 minutes and after half an hour all is silent for about 10 minutes. Those times are complete track times for Behrens. This does require a different attitude from the listener, to say the least. Behrens tracks are individually more concise and change tension faster, but all of them together are not such a good listening experience as López's track. So it's good that they have their own startcodes. It is quite impossible to establish a connection in sound between the works. They could well have been made from different sound sources. What I found surprising is López's use of sound manipulation that seems to go way beyond mere filtering. Different types of effects have been added. Behrens has made extensive use of sound degradation techniques, that give his material a grainy and noisy quality. Aside from the fact that both CD's once more contain great works that are a great pleasure to listen to, I do wonder about the necessity of releasing them together. Okay, these guys are friends and they created the sound material together, but this cannot really be heard in the result, so one somehow starts comparing them. And what good is that with high quality stuff like this?
Phosphor Magazine, The Netherlands 12/2004	Marc Behrens | Francisco López "a szellem álma" (double CD – .absolute.[Koblenz]) "a szellem álma", which means "the dream of a ghost", is a collaboration featuring Marc Behrens and Francisco López. The source material was made conjointly, but the individual artists set out the subsequent process of editing and arranging independently, and present us with the result, each on their own CD that is. At first, Marc Behrens' album resembles a world of noise bursts falling on top of each other, forming a cascade of hisses. Soon we are led into the world of microscopic events, from which subsequent waves of noise erupt. Microscopic events are layered on top of drones. It's fascinating to hear the composer's ability to build atmosphere through sound with what seems to be a relatively homogenic toolkit of source material. There are many unexpected turns, an abundance of micro-narratives forming small niches in an all-encompassing whole, a void populated by long dramatic stretches. López CD kicks off with a couple of minutes of silence. Mandatory. A deep rumble with organic rumbling hits us unexpectedly and continues to invade our field of hearing. Gusts of noise are added, fade away. López has done it again. We are made ingredients of a sonic machinery, where López pulls the occasional lever, and thus provokes a claustrophobic experience. More silence. We are gradually pulled back in the maze of hisses and drones, and are let go when we least expect it. Two different artists, and two very different kinds of movement. Whereas Behrens presents a more delicate and introvert piece, López has built a capturing machinery that knocks off of our feet. Both, however, succeed in capturing our attention, and display their fine ability to craft with sound.