Francisco Lopez
and Joe Collier "knowing when to not know" 3"CD
Antifrost afro2009
A classical frame.
2 minutes of nothing, slow ascent of forest noise building into
absolute sound climax and then lying down again. The final few minutes
of the disc is an illogical music mix, perhaps live music, mastered
very low. The actual sound quality is stunning, a usual for Lopez.
But because we live in Spain, on a pedestrian street, high volume
background noise pours into our apartment, so this CD is "polluted"
by my life. We do not often listen to music in a soundproof white
box, instead, we hear it with our lives. Therefore, the masculine
"all pervasive sound world" of Lopez is quite passive
in my house, and is forced to share its short run with boistrous
greetings and double cheek kisses going on down on the street below.
(Something Lopez is familiar with, living in Madrid, the loudest
city in Europe according to a recent EU study.)
This disc is the
perfect length: short. Not a criticism, Lopez and Collier needed
to make hard decisions to express a complete idea in the limited
space available to them. Also, the 3" length is against the
normal tendancy of an environmental noise CD - to drone on for the
length of the media for no reason other than egotistical sheer will.
The idea of the
title is to let go, to allow yourself to be violated by sound, unfiltered
by education. The goal is a buddhist like state of unconscious reflection,
I imagine. "You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and
I belong to this notebook and this pencil." Hemingway wrote
in A Moveable Feast. Both Hemingway and Lopez have a clear
poetic drive to enjoy life and the world for its good and evil.
I also find they both have lightly veiled colonialist tendancies
that the world is theirs for the taking, second only to their oevre,
and neither find consequences in their tourism. This manifests itself
in the sado-masochistic blindfolding technique Lopez uses during
his concerts, and other small points he does not address such as
possible consequences of a Spaniard recording the South American
rainforest in order to bring it back into the "civilized"
west.
However, since
Lopez does not mention these points, I will not go too far into
them, and instead enjoy the positive points he addresses: great
sound. Movements run as follows: rain bouncing off a shelter, high
holding insects, faint foundry roar growing to the front and arching
into feedback shooting stars and airline harmonics: but all this
activity is smooth like the rippling center of a great lake. The
end trickle leaves a space of expectation, but the extremely low
music mix (latin sounding music?) confounds a true resolution and
then the CD stops. I like it alot actually.