Gen Ken Montgomery

I met Francisco through the post. 
When I was in Berlin around 1987 I was helping Conrad Schnitzler by writing letters in English to some of his friends.  I wrote back and forth a few times with Andres Noble Gonzalous in Madrid for Conrad. Andre had released a few records of Conrad’s music on his label Esplendor Geométrico Discos. He became interested in releasing an LP from me and we had some back and forth about it before he released Gen Ken – Beyond My Ken on his label. In 1989 I found a cheap ticket to Madrid and even though I wasn’t planning on going to Madrid I decided to take this flight and meet Andre. When I arrived in Madrid I called Andre on the telephone. We had a tough time speaking because he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish! I was able to understand that I had to call back in 10 minutes. When I called back Francisco Lopez answered the phone. It turns out Francisco had been translating and writing letters for Andre as I had done for Conrad! This was how I met Francisco and even though we were meeting for the first time we had actually already been corresponding through our friends.

I living at the Spritzenhaus in Hamburg Germany in 1998 when I received a copy of “Belle Confusion 696” from Francisco Lopez. I had spoken with Francisco about the field recordings he had been recording in Costa Rico for this project and was very interested to hear what he had created with them. I especially wanted to  give this CD a proper listening, so I waited until I had the necessary time and space before I listened to it. When I had free time I laid out a pillow in front of 2 perfectly placed speakers and positioned myself between them before playing his CD. I turned on the player, closed my eyes and laid comfortably on my back. As I expected from Francisco’s work at this time, there was no abrupt beginning to the piece.  In fact the beginning was so subtle I had to listen very carefully to perceive it all. I focused on listening intensely as I attempted to discern his composition  from the subtle atmospheric sounds coming from the courtyard below my windows. Though I was in the heart of the city I became very aware of the presence of nature, the wind moving through the leaves on the trees, the chirping of the birds, the distant noise of cars and the muted sound of tools used by workers at a nearby construction site. I tried distinguishing these familiar sounds from the exotic Costa Rican sounds on the CD and I was amazed at how seamless the integration of Francisco’s composition of sounds were with the environmental sounds I was hearing. I made a note to compliment Francisco on his sensitivity and sonic subtlty. I was so immersed in this enjoyable listening experience I completely lost track of time. I went into a kind of daydream state. After what seemed like a very long time, at least an hour, I started to become restless, wondered how the CD would come to an end. Would it be abrupt or would it slowly fade into the background ambience of my listening space. It seemed like the CD was going on for an abnormally long time but as time can become distorted when one is very present with it I just went along with the sonic flow. I was patient but eventually I became impatient and curious about where I was on the CD and even wondering if the CD may have been on repeat. I slowly  got up and walked over to the CD player and discovered that the entire time I was listening the CD had been on  “pause”. This was truly a Belle Confusion!
-gen ken montgomery Hamburg 1998

Amy Denio

My first aural glimmer of Francisco Lopez happened in the late 1980’s, when I received a cassette from Madrid  containing an amazing, surreal mix of field recordings, little songs, and other noises.  He set afire my desire to record contemporaneous sounds, and compose to them, with them. 
Our audio correspondence began, and we delighted in trading our sonic densities and hollows, tones and drones and audio pixellations. 

He visited Seattle a few years later, so I had the pleasure of meeting a fascinating figure, a fellow sonic visionary. 
In August, 1999 I produced a concert for him in my home, and discovered first-hand the depth of his commitment to ‘descending into la belle confusion’.  We handed out blindfolds to the audience, and the quiet strains of distant lands combined together into a roaring crescendo under his capable guidance ~ and my commitment to the beauty of pure noise was signed, sealed and delivered.  We embarked on a lovely correspondence, which continues
to this day.

We traveled & played together on 3 continents the following summer, playing double concerts and experiencing new corners of the world (Bera, Basque Country; Buenos Aires and Patagonia, Argentina; Nashville TN).  I’ll never forget playing in Chattanooga TN (thanks, Shaking Rays!), where at a certain point, I peeked out from my blindfold to see that the speaker cones were actually GLOWING RED from the intensity of his special frequencies, flowing through and out.   In concert, I began to sing over these whirlpools of unidentifiable soundwaves, which he mixed into a rich, roaring multi-dimensional sonic universe.

In the Fall of 2000, he began (and quickly finished!) work on a recording featuring my voice, which he’d recorded throughout our
travels together, a very dark and beautiful recording (Belle Confusion 00).  I’ve created a few pieces inspired by him as well (7,500 Kisses, La Selva, En Mis Suenos).  He remains one of my greatest inspirations.  I adore his ferocious fascination of sound, and his dedication to listening deeply ~ and sharing ~ the eerie echoes one hears along the edges of ecology, where man is atom-sized in respect to the forces of nature.

Siegmar Fricke

Francisco Lopez has always been one of the most important figures in experimental ambient music. I have been in contact with him about 12 years ago when I received from him various CDs that I consider as essential and very influencial releases: “Warszawa Restaurant”, “Belle Confusion 966” and “Azoic Zone”. What I particularly like regarding his works is the very personal style and the idiosyncratic choice of sounds. In my opinion he is a pioneer of the most elementary abandoned ambient music. Recently he also collaborated with my musical partner Maurizio Bianchi. Francisco often created very long epic tracks that slowly develop and change in the course of 40 minutes. I also remember a very special track from him… “Solid state flesh”, starting with low frequencies one can hardly hear although the CD-player shows full volume…great.

Jeff Surak

In the summer of 2005 Francisco Lopez, Michael Gendreau, and myself embarked on a two week tour of eastern Europe, that covered about 3,000 miles through 6 countries. The tour was an endurance test and there were many “whacky” moments. One memorable gig is when we played a bar in Warsaw when it was reggae night. Francisco & Mic were hellbent on trying the locally made buffalo grass vodka Zubrovka. I think they underestimated its potency, which led to one of Francisco’s strangest sets yet, with a fight breaking out and Francisco storming out of the club transformed into Frankenstein. Afterwards we crashed a party at the museum where we were staying at (in the visiting artist guest room) that was full of mafia business types that featured Poland’s version of Madonna, and was sponsored by Siemens. Picture a courtyard of a castle surround by vacuum cleaners and refrigerators on platforms,  men in loud pin stripe suits with gun molls by their sides, and an awesome buffet spread from which we proceeded to grab food from with our bare hands. After stuffing our drunken asses and Francisco smearing cake all over the walls of the elevator we made it to our room and crashed for a few hours before catching the 8am train to Vilnius.

Thomas Bey William Bailey

I’ve been in communication with practicioners of the sonic arts long enough to realize something that, in my more naïve days, would have come as a shock to me: the most skillful and effective creators in this community can be ‘all too human’ all too often, exhibiting the same logical contradictions and inconsistencies of character that truly enlightened artists are supposed to have risen above (the more fawning hagiographies of artists would have you believing these people were born without character flaws, but even I haven’t been naïve enough to buy into that.) Over the years, I’ve watched as the makers of deeply affecting music reveal themselves to be antagonistic, abusive drunks. I’ve seen the creators of wild and anarchic works get taken in by the most doctrinaire and banal forms of politicking. I’ve seen purveyors of creative boldness exhibiting a disappointing cowardice in all other areas of life (e.g. the friend who fled to Central Europe some time ago, and has since spent every waking day railing against we Americans who don’t ‘stand up’ against oppression.) Let’s face it: powerful art is not the undisputed territory of great personalities. Only the most die-hard among the pure aesthetes can now believe that great art and moral character are inseparable. Many of the best works of art are created by fallible individuals who otherwise have a good sense of timing (i.e. knowing when the time is right to “set off” a new movement or technical innovation), possess strong persuasive skills, or just succeed by sheer dumb luck.

And then, along comes someone like Francisco López. I don’t often write reviews of individuals, especially ones I’m still in contact with, but I feel he’s an exceptional case worth studying, if not emulating in certain ways. He has managed to escape the aforementioned “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” scenario because, I believe, there is no point where he ever “separates himself” from his work. As his long-standing involvement with the de-centralized ‘Cassette Culture’ attests to, blurring the line between social energy and productivity is easier than you might think, and can lead to that sought after merger of Art and Life. But the network involvement is only part of the story: when one’s creative work consists of nomadically traversing nearly the entire globe, recording the countless impressions that can be made upon the human sensorium, and finding new ways to sonically affect it (to say nothing of keeping in continual contact with a network of like-minded spirits), is there even time for an “off-duty” personality to exist and to upstage the efforts of the active, “working” personality? Francisco also refers to his performance events as “immersive” experiences, and because the nature of his work requires his complete absorption in any given environment – in order to identify the discreet audio phenomena in those respective environments that re-kindle the spirit – I don’t think he is being arrogant by implying that the effects of his personal immersion may be passed on to an audience. Speaking about the ‘immersion concert,’ Francisco claims that it is

…an experience that shows how the compartments of the mind or the spirit of each person are very different in each case. And through the experience I try to create live, some people access those parts within themselves. For me, to define spirituality in a universal way makes no sense- I could not do it, but I notice a kind of common denominator in these interior areas that are reached through that experience.1

It has to be said, this interest in the development of the spirit will surprise people who have a cartoon image of artists in this field: when I was looking in on it from the outside, the stereotype of a self-identifying ‘Futurist’ or even ‘sound artist’ was a cynic that had given up on human life, and who recorded and performed the most un-subtle noise possible so as to have a good sardonic laugh at the fragility of the human organism. If this stereotype persists, it is maybe because producers like Francisco just continue to refine their own work rather than issuing lengthy rebuttals and statements of their ‘true intent.’ Our shared modernity, defined as it is by an endless variety of ephemeral communicative distraction and electronically assisted social grooming, has left a large amount of the populace unprepared for a creative personality that takes Francisco’s approach. That is to say, a more “essentialist” style of communicating, with its extended periods of silence free from self-justification and self-promotion, may breed discomfort in people who have fully embraced modern, “always on” conventions of interaction. I feel that some people, when faced with a creator who gives them no biographical asides to supplement the experience of their artwork, would actually prefer a hostile curmudgeon berating them from the pages of print magazines and hectoring them from the stage- in popular audio culture, there are few other existing reference points for an “immersive” artist who trusts his own material to do all the talking. And so, it is a shame that, in spite of what’s written here, that many will still see Francisco’s work as being some sort of confrontational novelty act, or a mere attempt to have the final say in a struggle to ‘out-minimalize’ the competition: “oh, he’s that guy who blindfolds people at his concerts, and never uses any CD artwork.”

Well, this material is “about” blindfolds and unadorned compact discs in the same way that The Who was “about” turning guitar smashing into a spectator sport.
As a CD entitled Belle Confusion suggests, the romance of the unfamiliar has been the major component of Francisco’s work; the golden thread that links together his involvement in trans-national audio networks, his post-musique concrète embrace of ‘schizophonic’ sound (i.e. the obscuring of the source that has produced a certain sound) and even his past forays into entomology. This latter interest of Francisco’s, I believe, is one that has an interesting bearing on understanding of our subject’s work: on insectoid life, Maurice Maeterlinck once wrote that it “seems far removed not merely from our own habit of life, but even outside the morale and psychology of our globe […] one would say it came from another planet, more energetic, more monstrous, more unfeeling, more atrocious, more infernal than ours…” One detects a slight bit of envious awe blended in with the horror of Maeterlinck’s words, not unlike the praise lavished upon the insectoid killing machine of the first Alien film (see the famous “I admire its purity” speech of the treacherous android Ash before he gets dispatched with a flamethrower.) It’s a good approximation of the complex emotional reaction that I often feel when experiencing a new López release: the exhilirating feeling of encountering something that seems to have extra-terrestrial origins, yet knowing it is much closer to my experience than I immediately percieve it to be. This re-mystification of the world is something that we desperately need, and although it can be done by observing the nature of insects – their habits of swarming and construction being at once human and inhuman – Francisco’s audio works make it much easier to do so for people not specially trained in biological matters. There’s a great beauty and relevance in works that can make you appreciate life forms that are not domesticated and, by extension, phenomena that defy explanation. Without someone to point out the existence of such phenomena, inspiration itself dies, and we become stagnant in a world where – as per architect B.V. Doshi – “change is a basic human need.”

Francisco once refered to the modern ‘nomad’ as someone who was always “in the world,” someone who made no distinction between “inside” and “outside.” This, again, is the principle of immersion at work. He doesn’t strive to distinguish himself as a source of historical events, and consequently doesn’t attempt to stand outside of the sound networks or to stand apart from his own creations. The great irony of this, which you can probably see coming, is that his legacy will last longer than many of those who have consciously strived after these things.

- Thomas Bey William Bailey, winter 2011