11/01/21 SoundArtist.ru 14 – Francisco López. SONOPOLIS
Commissioned by the Studio Akustische Kunst in Cologne in 2011, “SONOPOLIS” is a sound piece created by means of a dramatic evolution of original recordings of urban sound environments all over the world, recorded between 1985 and 2010. Spanning more than one hundred cities in the five continents — from Montreal to Ushuaia, from Lisbon to Moscow, from Dakar to Cape Town, from Taipei to Melbourne.
Francisco López: “I have explored the sonic matter of these urban environments in all their multiplicity and complexity. In contrast with common representational, documentative or descriptive takes on location recordings, however, my approach to sonic matter is phenomenological and compositional. Fragments, details, and textures contained in these recordings have been selected and used in a massive process of editing, reconfiguration, processing, layering, polishing, iterative mixing, etc., to give rise to a new unexistent, magnified, dramatically hyper-real “polis”. The result is a highly “abstract” immersive sonic environment in which the virtual spaces are combined and succeed each other through an internal “geography” laden with acoustic nuances, wide dynamics (from the subtle to the monumental), textures, and sound events of a large variety.”
