Francisco Lopez has been building his own fascinating and highly original sound aesthetic for twenty-five years now, which has materialized in an immense production, around 180 works, which has enjoyed the collaboration of around a hundred international artists and has been published by around 150 labels from all over the world. At the base of this impressive prolificacy is a single great obsession: sound. Not his production but listening, or rather the possibility of returning to a pure, deep, clean listening of sound. A “blind” listening in which there are no visual or conceptual elements, because every image, every diaphragm can distance you from the essence of the sound. For this reason, on some CDs – and almost all of them have extremely essential packaging with no graphic elements other than a text to identify the album and tracks – a blindfold has been inserted and for the same reason the performance untitled 0508 will be blind. Lopez moves around the world, collects sounds, makes field recordings, re-elaborates and processes them, giving life to a particular and highly suggestive ambient music. All the complex processes remain almost imperceptible, so that the intensity of the sound and the experience seems guaranteed precisely by an absolute simplicity. But this is not the case, because the simplicity is only apparent: the musical catalogue that Lopez handles – the recordings of “natural” sounds, noises and silences have been made in over fifty countries – aims to bring listening back to feeling and to promote personal and profound sensorial experiences.
