Francisco López — Untitled #275

Francisco López usually obscures urban or rural field recordings to produce unidentifiable sound objects of intense contrasts and meditative properties, but having whet his listeners’ appetite with recent work that uses traditional instrumentation as its source (from Phill Niblock’s orchestrations to a large collection of thrash metal drumming samples), the Spanish sound artist has now composed a work for prepared piano. But while the sounds produced on this most conventional of instruments are subject to López’ studio processes revealing a surprising array of sonic jewels from the single sound source along the way, the first movement is a straight live recording of López original composition providing a rare glimpse of the raw unmanipulated sounds he chose to work with.

Performed by the diverse and masterful Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt, Movement 1 is a stark, monochromatic affair. Playing a “mechanically-prepared” piano, van Houdt takes us through periods of rapid hammering, often of a single note, that somehow reminds of both Alvin Lucier’s exploration of percussive phenomena on Opera with Objects and the incessant jabbing of Nurse With Wound’s ‘Cold’ from the Thunder Perfect Mind LP. These choppy passages last up to five minutes and are alternated with periods of similar length but containing the most minimal sounds: sustained chords that chime slowly, framed in silence to highlight their subtle, trailing overtones. The focus on regular rhythms roughly gilded by piano tones sets a stealthy, paranoid scene.

And one can’t help wonder if such a scene was designed with López’ proprietary “evolutionary studio transformation” in mind, composing Movement 1 as a seed from which to harvest specific sonic matter for heavy manipulation. Indeed, Movement 2, built entirely from Movement 1, is a far richer experience, although no less trepidatious. The contrasting passages are still there, but often played at a much slower rate providing deliciously daunting sub-bass depth charges that churn up the delicate sedimentary sounds. What was bright, sparse chords now seem like muted beams of light questing through a dank darkness (you think you can even detect a stony dripping at several points throughout the piece). Meanwhile Movement 1’s frenetic charges are morphed into shuddering and shivering mechanisms, like being in a particularly demented clock makers workshop. By the end of the piece any sense of the piano has been removed in place of a polyrhythmic perversity at the heart of darkness.