Francisco Lopez

Untitled #123 is a continuous mechanical drone piece that juxtaposes long moments of silence with fragments of machine-generated noise, and these long silences seem to heighten the impact of the noises when they do occur. Listening to Untitled #123 is like being strapped to a conveyor belt with some horrible torture device waiting for you at the end: the silences represent fainting spells, while the sound awakens you to having your body decimated in increments until the gory finale. Just try listening to this recording in the dark. In dropping this CD in the player, absolutely nothing occurs until the ten-minute mark, where the sound of a motor or buzz saw occurs in fragments, then more silence. At the 20-minute mark is another excursion in machine-driven noise, this time with the noise slices brought closer together, then again silence. At the 45-minute mark, the drone returns for several long minutes, sounding like airplane engines just before takeoff, before again giving way to a final ominous silence. Apparently these sounds were harvested in a silo of some sort where this mysterious machine would reverberate its sounds. Francisco Lopez's approach has more to do with the architecture of sound in the vein of noise and psycho-acoustic masters Merzbow and Aube. Though the silences tend to be a bit long, Francisco Lopez's delivery of noise is unique.