Francisco López + Novi_sad — Titans

Thanasis Kaproulias' (Novi_sad) refreshingly autodidactic approach to electro-acoustic composition has set him apart from his more academic peers in the field. This has perhaps been one of the reasons he has enjoyed many collaborative projects with older, more prolific artists working in similar areas (many of whom are from the mighty Touch roster who also now publish his recordings). And they don't come more prolific than Spain's Francisco López, whose mysterious, untitled and heavily processed field recordings now number well over 200.

Indeed, on this joint release where the artists each use the same source material gathered in Kaproulias' homeland of Greece in the Ancient Olympia region, López' contribution is referred to as 'Untitled #249'. And it's another unique and immersive journey through a faintly recognisable yet totally skewed soundworld. It begins with a fragile atmosphere threatened by subsonic rumbling as an arc of cavernous groans spreads to portray a deep tunnel through which the listener slowly glides. The underground ambience grows spectrally to suggest ghosts of a devotional choir, their stony, haunted reverberations gradually adding a little light to better define the tunnel's structure. Howling through the empty space comes a growing dark energy gradually strengthening all the while until a sudden, single hit cuts it off and replaces it with a lavish throbbing sub-bass tone. This sudden, lone event rudely awakens a chirruping and cheeping mass of life whose chattering violence bears similarities to Albert Aylers's free jazz explosions. As the bottom end loses out to the teeming, shrill risers, López gradually narrows the frequency range to the uppermost quarters to create a sense of entropy, perhaps alluding to the source environment's decaying architecture.

Coming second, Novi_sad's contribution begs to be compared with López' masterful opening piece, with expectations of discovering more about the original sound matter. 'Ellipsis', a title no more revealing than López muted track names, opens with more overt sound matter in the form of a deliciously dark and doomy storm. The unnaturally constant rumble of thunder joins with wet drips and splashes of rain that build into a fast stream on which we leave the thunder behind, the watery sounds whistling and bristling as the flow accelerates further. Out of nowhere, owls hoot as a sudden switch introduces an ominous drone over which a baby cries in a kind of Lynchian portent of an arcane crisis. The airy drone soars on and on gaining bleak, sibilant rattles and chirrups as it powers up to suggest an absorbant presence unleashed in the middle of an otherwise empty field. It seems to be mercilessly absorbing more and more of the surrounding energies like an Earth-born black hole as the intensity and volume relentlessly increases. Eventually it fades to reintroduce the puddles and streams of rainfall coursing through the chirruping and cheeping fields much calmer than López' angry birds and insects; while musical, almost orchestral tones rise to the surface to meet an increasingly reverberant plop of thrown stones, all building to an intense level like a feedback loop of historic echoes.

Through pairing two independently created, sophisticated soundworlds birthed from the same source material, the listener is rewarded with an additional comparative dimension to otherwise mysterious, but no less impressive, journeys in sound. Repeated listens reward with new insights into both their common ground and their divergent strategies that deftly contrasts frequencies to run the full dramatic gamut from calm to intense and natural to supernatural.