Francisco López: Untitled #244

Read interviews with Francisco López and you’ll see a number of interesting names come up: the philosopher E.M. Cioran, the Futurist Luigi Russolo and other theorists and thinkers who advocate a kind of passionate (“passional” is a word López uses about himself) and self-defined vision. This album, the latest in his series of Untitleds, is a single track, almost an hour long, made of “original environmental recordings done in multiple underwater and abovewater locations in the Paraná and Paraguay rivers”. It opens with wind and liquid swishing and the peeping of birds. But then, it evolves and grows abstract. The water noises lose their watery quality; they no longer seem to belong to a specific location, such as a river. Instead, they become undefined, enveloping, and you remember that in the past he has made music out of the luminous, churning sounds of cities and machines. Without instruments or a rhythm that might evoke a genre or a predecessor or even a musician, the album moves toward the status of an in-itself artifact, one that demands, and in this case deserves, time and attention.