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Francisco passed on this text of the liner notes for this release & gave permission for them to be reproduced here - thanks Francisco !. it should be pointed out however that, as some of the reviews have mentioned, no amount of writing can capture the nature of this release (which is a good thing if you ask me).
Wind [Patagonia] is a work that has been created under the same perspective than La Selva (V2_Archief V228, 1998; featuring sound environments from the Costa Rican jungle) and Buildings [New York] (V2_Archief, V232, 2001; featuring inner sound environments of buildings in New York City). Non-processed, not mixed environmental sound matter from a certain ‘reality’. An appraisal of the richness and essential qualities of the original sonic material. A non-referential intention. An extreme phenomenological immersion led by anti-rationality and anti-purposefulness. A world devoid of human presence. A passion for drones and their inner universe; that perceptually ‘invisible’ matrix of broad-band noise that is constantly flowing around us, both in nature and in man-made environments. A tour de force of profound listening in which every listener has to face his/her own freedom and thus create.
In Patagonia, vastness and solitude are shaped and reinforced by the constant presence of wind. Contrary to the stereotype of barren empty spaces as ‘quiet’, wind creates there –as in many other places- a relentless environment of sonic strength. Wind is an invisible force that most of the time is hearable through transducers such as plants, rocks, sand, snow or ice. It affects the perception of space, distance, weather and even our own body. As sonic matter, it seems to be made up of an outmost simplicity and gives the illusion of uniformity. That is why its richness is so astonishing and engaging. Wind recordings are essentially a broad-band substance that reconfigures itself in its spectrum composition and its dynamics at every instant, very often with sudden shifts and turns that simultaneously change the virtual space of the recording at an unpredictable and complex pace. Because of these particular features, and of its lack of traditional tonal or rhythmic character, wind might be the ultimate challenge for those seeking ‘music’ in nature in the naive thrill of similarities between natural sonic events and human-made structures.
Francisco López, November 2005.
The Sublime and the Sonic Life of Nature
Christoph Cox
Wind [Patagonia] marks the final installment in Francisco López’s “Trilogy of the Americas,” the sound artist’s magnum opus. Geographically, the trilogy covers the western hemisphere, from New York City to the southern tip of Argentina. Temporally, it spans López’s career, from his emergence in the mid-1990s to his current status as one of the world’s leading sound artists. In this and other ways, the trilogy offers a kind of intellectual and artistic biography of the Spanish-born artist. Trained as an entomologist, López’s initial attraction to the world of “broad-band sound” and “acousmatic listening” was prompted by his fieldwork in Central American rainforests, spaces dense with sound, the sources of which, however, remain largelyhidden from view. The first disc in the series, La Selva, openly acknowledges this provenance of López’s art. On first hearing, it might seem to be a traditional nature recording that archives the characteristic sounds of a particular place, in this case, the Costa Rican rainforest preserve that gives the disc its title. Yet, inspired by musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, López affirms the fact that the every recording casts itself adrift from the contingencies of source and place, and that this separation and abstraction allows the listener to hear this material differently: as pure sound matter.[1] <#_ftn1>
Dedicated to the exploration of such pure sound matter, López is unconcerned with the distinctions between nature and culture, the organic and the inorganic. He is as interested in the squawk of the Red-lored parrot as he is in the hum of air ducts and the rattle of boilers. Indeed, the trilogy’s second part, Buildings [New York], demonstrates that the fabricated soundscape of New York City is as rich, varied, and delightful as the lush life of the tropical rainforest. The city’s architecture reveals itself to have a sort of inorganic life, to be a collection of oversized bodies built of steel, concrete, plastic, and glass the mechanical arteries of which pulse with air, water, electricity, and binary code. The final piece in the trilogy, Wind [Patagonia], brings this trajectory full circle. The simplest and most elegant of the three, it further explores the non-biotic sound sources that intrigued López in the rainforest, in this case the sonic power of air gusts and currents.
Of course, López makes it clear that none of his recordings are neutral presentations of sonic environments. Rather, they are compositions, the result of a series of artistic decisions that include the choice of material and its framing. Wind [Patagonia] highlights one such choice, a sine qua non of field recording: the choice of microphones. The distorted blasts foregrounded in the first few minutes of the piece remind us that the perception of sound involves not only a source of vibration but also a receptive surface—the vibrating membranes of the microphone and eardrum. Anyone who has taken a walk on a windy day knows that the sound of wind is as much in here as it is out there. And, just as, in La Selva, we do not hear rain itself but the impact of rainwater on leaves and soil, so, in Wind [Patagonia], we hear the wind only as it flutters—and occasionally overloads—the microphone’s diaphragm. Beyond its documentary status, then, Wind [Patagonia] draws our attention to the very nature of sound, hearing, and recording. The composition focuses on the very medium of sonic transport (air). It highlights the fact that wind and sound are simply the results of pressure changes in that medium. And it provokes our awareness that hearing is the translation of that pressure into electric signals in the microphone and ear.
Aesthetically, Wind [Patagonia] references the ancient tradition of the aeolian harp and aeolian flute, musical instruments constructed to be played by the wind. Yet, like wind chimes, such instruments domesticate, humanize, and musicalize the wind. López is interested in something else: in the intensity and impact of the wind itself, its elemental force and non-human power. The difference between these two sensibilities is captured by a distinction that became prominent in the 18th century and that has been revived in postmodern aesthetic discourse: the distinction between “the beautiful” and “the sublime.” For theorists such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the beautiful offers a positive pleasure, the aesthetic enjoyment of tones and forms that are determinate and harmonious, operating within the scope of the human imagination.[2] <#_ftn2> The sublime, too, offers pleasure, but a pleasure mixed with pain, the tension and agitation that arises from forms that are indeterminate because they exceed the human grasp. To exemplify the sublime, Burke and Kant draw examples from nature: the awesome scale and power of mountains, storms, and volcanos, for example. López’s Patagonian winds have just this ferocious beauty and immensity. Periods of calm are followed by the most violent eruptions. Delicate whispers combine with wild swarms and eddies undergirded by deep bass punches. And all of this produced by an invisible force that endlessly sweeps the surface of the globe. With this, we are no longer in the tidy world of human music, but have entered the sublime domain of natural sound.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze presents a materialist description of nature not in terms of things but entirely in terms of self-directed flows and processes. Ignoring the disciplinary boundaries between geology, biology, linguistics, economics, sociology, etc., Deleuze describes all these flows as the results of dynamic, intensive processes of difference and differentiation.[3] <#_ftn3> López offers a similar description of audible nature. For López, the world of “broad-band sound” is a ubiquitous and endlessly fascinating world of forces, flows, and complex systems of interaction and self-regulation. Wind, for example, is simply a name for differences in air pressure and temperature that generate currents, streams, fronts, and bursts on the earth’s surface. Wind [Patagonia] makes these forces and flows fully audible and draws our attention to this general feature of the natural world. The flora and fauna of the Costa Rican rainforest, the inorganic life of New York City architecture, the turbulent winds of Patagonia—all provide different aural openings onto the perpetual flow of broad-band sound that constitutes the sonic life of nature.
Christoph Cox, May 2006.
Notes:
[1] See Francisco López, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter,” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 82–87.
[1] See, for example, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §§1–29.
[1] See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For a development of these themes, see Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997.
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[1] <#_ftnref1> See Francisco López, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter,” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 82–87.
[2] <#_ftnref2> See, for example, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §§1–29.
[3] <#_ftnref3> See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For a development of these themes, see Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997.
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