Francisco Lopez
"Buildings" CD

  Francisco Lopez is a leading light in the world of experimental or avant-garde music. He is especially renowned for his minimalism and systematic presence of silence inside his compositions. On this new release of the Dutch V2 Archief label, you can hear the resulting work realized under the commission of a project around Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage (by the way, listen also to the John Hudak "Brooklyn Bridge" CD on Alluvial to hear another approach).
Here no presence of silent segments but instead a long piece of manipulations of urban backgrounds recordings. The music is one piece slowly and constantly evolving between discrete town sounds (as building site noises) and more abstracts parts composed by buzzing and whizzing sounds. Sometimes you have the sensation that you just have heard the same fragment 10 minutes ago.
And here I think lies the magic of this record : Lopez delicately arranges and plays with environnemental sounds that are so familiar to every human being living in towns, that is, almost everybody. Eventually he manages to transcend the daily urban sound spectrum in an memorable way. Moreover, this CD could be considered as the urban counterpart of his preceding record on V2, "La Selva" which was a soundwork based on tropical natural field recordings. In conclusion, this CD is really excellent and should be considered by any fan of field recordings artworks.
 
V2 Archief CD (2001)- time: 69.04