Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. In this workshop, he will discuss how his sound creative practice has been shaped over the past 40+ years by two main environments of influence that divert from common music training: the independent home-music worldwide network (starting in the late 70s) and the influence of ‘real world’ sonic environments, particularly from nature. He will present these realms in a much wider social and historical context, recognizing and discussing the immense influence they have had on a gigantic community of sonic creators worldwide for several decades now.

Unlike the now classic canons of ‘field recordings’ or ‘soundscapes’, López’s work with environmental recordings is not informed by representational goals but rather by the intention of creating new worlds of sonic experience based on a transformation of that source / inspirational ‘reality’. This approach is akin to the recent philosophical field of “object-oriented-ontology”; it considers sounds themselves as self-sufficient, first-order ontological entities, and proposes a deeper and more intimate connection with sonic ‘reality’ than that of traditional representation.

One of the main elements of this development of new sonic realities as public shared experiences has to do with a reconfiguration of sound systems and spaces towards an immersive experience that challenges the general canon of the stage. The stage is an ancient convention for the establishment of a contemplative experience that has been uncritically adopted by most Western musical practices. In the case of electronic / experimental music, the absence of a stage––and thus its perceptive and symbolic consequences––permits to reunite in a single person the generator / controller of sound, transfers the attention from the performer to the sound itself, and transforms the sonic experience from contemplative to immersive.