Nos hacemos eco en este post de la entrevista realizada a Francisco López por Miguel de Sonic Terrain.

Expanded Listening: An Interview with Francisco López

Francisco López needs no introduction, but let’s take the risk. I guess an introduction to his work is not something he would really prefer, as his perspective is actually fed by avoiding being defined, closed or schematised in a singular point. Similar to Pythagoras, López places himself behind the curtain, in the invisible lands of listening and he seems to be even more radical than the traditional acousmatics, as his figure doesn’t even make a shadow, getting submerged and dissolved in sound in order to conduct the listening experience into unconquered and unconquerable realms, just open to the nakedness of sound and exposing the listener to infinite possibilities of the experience.

López talks about post-music and ways of being aware of the sound on its core, a vision that has been evolving over the years into a radical perspective which characterises his thinking and way of working. López’s perspective lies in an expansion of listening from going to sound-in-itself; seeking, above all, a constant openness, fluency of coming and going of the hearing and its space, its purpose, its dissolution. That’s why his records and listening offerings tend to lack of description and when it comes to performance he invites to cover the eyes of the audience in order to find a working axis in which is possible to bring the sound as such, without add-ons: unprecedented and divested listening; expanded listening, as he says.

The usual exploration of soundscapes and the concepts or practices that come with that activity, inadvertently focus on a seemingly intrinsic relation to the visual, semantic, cultural or political context. But in the case of López, it goes further (or closer) as his work disregards all unnecessary ornaments or predefined representational links in order to establish a portal of listening able of revealing the irrelevant of the definition, thus exposing the need for immersion.

Also, his sound work values ??the act of field recording outside the common context of sound recording, approaching the recorder as a means of reconstruction and transformation, as a critical and compositional tool in which what is written is pure emergency, spatial virtuality, potentiality for re-construction of reality. And it is in this invisible contract where López aims to engage the listener, inviting us to be invaded by listening and transvaluing the experience hence leading the listener to pass from a role of a simple sound receiver, to one of intimate participant of a direct dialogue with the sound phenomenon in which contrary to enclose the listener, new experiences arises. López puts the listener ‘in brackets’, taking the person outside of the common margins, breaking the schemes that prevents us for truly listening.

At the moment of listening to his works, there’s no artist, no specific message, no conclusions, no fixed expression, but an expansible invitation to listen to the sound in completely unique ways. Better let him exposes it:

How your conception of sound has evolved through the years and how different is it to day compared to what you conceived at first place?

In short: from acoustics to philosophy, from reproduction to immersion, from “interesting” to daring, from representation to sound-in-itself. These shifts are not the result of some “theoretical” machinations but precisely a consequence of my practices of listening, recording and creating with sound.

Full interview here.