Through the Looking Glass (review)

Some years ago I recall visiting a sound installation by Francisco López. I cannot recall the name of the piece, although I do recall the experience. In a quiet room with speakers, I waited. Knowing López's work and seeing that the room was almost totally empty, I expected nothing but sound. And this was, in a way, what I got—though I never actually heard anything. Standing in that room, I couldn't hear anything except for the subtle and gentle rattling of the windows. Eventually the whole room started to quake. And still nothing coming from the speakers (or so I thought). Then I realized that the speakers were, in fact, playing sounds, but they were outside of my hearing range. These non-human sounds were only accessible to me indirectly via their acoustic and physical effects on the space itself (the windows, the floor, my body). Eventually more audible, rumbling bass sounds did make their appearance, but only after the sounds had first manifested themselves as the physical space itself.

This play between sound in space and sound as space is, for me, indicative of much of Francisco López's work. For over 30 years, López has been working in that liminal space between the audible and the inaudible, producing recorded works, installations and live performances. Recently, the Vienna-based label Kairos released Through the Looking Glass, a beautifully produced CD box set of López's work. While López's output is voluminous, Through the Looking Glass offers an excellent survey of one of the most important sound artists of our time. The set ranges from field recordings made in the early 1990s to more abstract ambient works from the late 1990s to recent work that exists at the limits of sonic experience. While there are discernible continuities in López's work, in my view, the pieces collected on Through the Looking Glass are of four types, each differing in the way they balance the sounds of the world and sound worlds. Qal'at Abd'ai-Salam (1993) and O Parladoiro Desamortuxado (1995) both combine field recordings with various sound processing effects.

The sources of both pieces are discernible— one hears birds, cicadas, the bustle of street markets, the hum of the countryside, resplendent forests, the echo of a distant temple. The sources retain their referential aspect ("bird," "car," "bell"), but the subtle effects and layering gradually create a vibrant cacophony, a kind of shimmering din that belongs neither to the external world nor to the world of purely synthetic or electronic sounds. The titles of these pieces hint at this cacophonic naturalism ("The Game of Mud," "A Time Spirit in the Body of a Plant"). In these pieces, sounds taken from the world begin as referential sounds and gradually become non-referential. At the same time, they never completely lose their referential quality, placing us as listeners in a strange in-between place.

From here López experiments with this relationship between sound and effects. In La Selva (1997) and Buildings (New York) (2001), López presents us with sounds without effects. Both are straight field recordings but from very different environments—in La Selva the recordings are drawn from several sites in the Costa Rican jungle, while Buildings (New York) are drawn from different residential, industrial and office buildings in Manhattan. While there is no processing to the sounds, these are, strangely, the most surreal of the recordings, in part because we as listeners do not know if one location simply follows another in sequence or if different locations are layered on top of each other, producing an "impossible" sonic reality. Both pieces are also characterized by an abstract texture—a swarming texture of insects and rain in the jungle, and the vacuous, ambient hum of empty buildings, generator rooms and abandoned tunnels. These field recordings are "fields" in the true sense, in that they transform a physical location in the world into a...