Francisco Lopez “Inner Sound”, Milano, Auditorium San Fedele, 04.04.2022

Those of you who are familiar to this blog are still aware of the interesting even if somehow bothering parade of electronic music and musicians that takes place every year at the San Fedele Auditorium in Milan. Bothering because sound is not always perfect, some choices – not only about the musicians involved, but also about how music is presented, acoustically speaking – are questionable and if you want to know more you can read my review of Eliane Radigue concert last year at this link.

But more important, yesterday night I attended a couple of performances one of which less interesting and the other one very cool. Let’s start with the worse: Mattia Loris Siboni, born in 1996, winner of a San Fedele prize in 2019, presented his work “In Memoriam Hieremiae Prophetae” (i.e. “In Memory of the Prophet Jeremiah”). For those of you who don’t know the story, and trying to make it as short as possible, Jeremiah opposed the political power of his time during the war against Babylon, and for that reason was immersed in the mud into a tower.

Siboni mixes in this work field recordings and ascensional melodies, indicating the prophet was saved by the pity of an Ethiopian councillor of the king, Ebed-Mèlech and taken outside the mud. So we heard for half an hour the ascensional melody interspersed with the field recordings: a not particularly brilliant solution to be honest, a little bit boring and lacking a dynamic development. Even the use of the field recordings is too simply descriptive, to be honest. I believe Siboni deserve to be recognized as a composer, but sometimes the urgency to communicate a story or a message kills the music or affects the way a given musician tells his own story.

Luckily, the same didn’t happen with Francisco Lopez. Another disciple of Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of ‘musique concrète’ (i.e. concrete music), Lopez presented a work titled aptly “Inner Sound”, where the field recordings taken into the Amazon forest were interspersed into an industrial sonic landscape. Here the dynamics of sound were not only interestingly realized, but also imagined. As an example, for a couple of times (e.g. the passing from the industrial to the equatorial lanscape) we faced a sound that was increasing its volume not vertically but horizontally, in the face of the audience.

For the sake of the record, I have to admit that at the end of the performance part of the audience were discussing about whether Francisco Lopez was developing a way of thinking about the music or presenting a mere reproduction of past glories of concrete/industrial music. I really believe that the grace and the mastery we heard were solid gold, and that Lopez deserves to be taken as one of the most intriguing electonic composers nowadays.

Francisco Lopez for almost forty years has developed his own sonic universe, trying with success to destroy the boudaries between industrial music and environmental sounds creating a sonic world of his own. Working in almost seventy countries of all the continents, he realized works, many or which are available through his Bandcamp page, including music created with sounds taken from both artificial (i.e. human-built) and natural environments, and his idea of music is so open that the listener is taken as the last but not the less important ring of the creative chain, so to speak.

In fact, Lopez believes, as Ludwig Wittengstein, that every work of art need an end-user, a listener, who will give the work its final but partial meaning thanks to his senses and connections he’ll be able to create between what he’ll listen to and a possible sense. Wittengstein is more explicit than that: he declared that every work of art changes meaning thanks to every user every time it is enjoyed. I believe Lopez wouldn’t disagree with that.

As far as me, the sense I gave last night to Lopez’ work was that of a discovery: in fact, I was more fascinated by the industrial sounds, with its far echoes, the circular and slow rhythms, than by the analogic and natural ones. Not a surprise since I live near a big city, but I really asked myself if the first group of sounds, the industrial ones, are more interesting to be manipulated while the animals and the rain are in a way more penetrating.

That is to say, maybe, that industries are part of a fascinating trip nowadays, as if the dream of the contemporary composers has become true, while the nature is still wild and indomitable, more dangerous for us as individuals and maybe as species. That’s why not all we are implied in fighting against the global trauma of the climate change: we have relocated ourselves during the eras, so as far as we are from nature, we can’t really understand her. At least, not the majority of us.

More prosaically, obviously the industrial sounds are more regular and dark than the sounds of nature, more organic but also more accidental. We do know what to expect in an abandoned factory, and that’s part of its charm, but we don’t know what to expect in a rainforest, and that’s why it can be really scary. So, many of us will continue to live in alienating cities instead that in warm nature. A pessimistic message, but don’t bother Francisco Lopez for that: blame it on myself only.

The review “Inner Spaces” will continue on April 8 with Syntax Ensemble and on May 2 with Otolab and Marta De Pascalis. There is also space for the Responsories of the Holy Week on April 10 – we’re talking about a review promoted by the Catholic Church after all – and for cinema, with the projection of the movie “North by Northwest” by Alfred Hitchcock.