Francisco Lopez Café Oto

Extract

The audience sits blindfolded in concentric circles, facing away from the performer. Refusing any visual accompaniment, and presenting sounds from his vast archive of field recordings without context or explicit identification, field recordist and sound artist Francisco Lopez asks the audience to wear these blindfolds to remove any distraction, and encourages them towards an intense focus on the sonic material he is about to present. Lopez describes the blindfolds as a ‘voluntary commitment to listening’. He believes that sounds are ‘things’, physical entities that have character(s) and substance. What follows is a bewildering array of material: rural, urban, animal, elemental.