Francisco López: VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics

At 8pm on both Friday, October 27th & Saturday, October 28th ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary by welcoming acclaimed sonicist, composer, and biologist Francisco López’s presentation VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics. With roots in industrial music, and a penchant for recording everything from rainforests to New York skyscrapers, López’s work concerns complex phenomenological referencing to the “substance of reality" - in texture, in complexity, in richness, and in virtual space. Internationally acclaimed for the intensity and astonishing audio detail of his live immersive surround performances, López’s work is presented in multi-channel sound, in the dark, on two special evenings to a limited-capacity blindfolded audience in his New York home, ISSUE Project Room.

Between Friday, Oct 13th and Saturday, Nov 4th, ISSUE invites audiences to experience numerous programs including new commissions and restaging of programs specifically designed for a limited capacity environment of 74 people.  Francisco Lopez has a long & storied history with ISSUE Project Room having presented work in 2006, 2008 and 2012, during his Floating Points Residency, utilizing Stephan Moore’s 16-Channel Hemispherical Speaker System, when the organization was based at The Old American Can Factory. He first presented at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater in 2014, before returning for two performances in 2018, co-presented with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

“Like a cinematographer racking focus, Mr. López was frequently able to draw the ear from one fascination to the next. And, occasionally, he opted for deep-focus clarity, letting everything in his sonic frame gleam with pristinely arranged dramatic purpose.”  — Seth Colter Walls, New York Times, June 27, 2018

López returns to New York for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting his new VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics. This creation was developed from a myriad of original sound recordings of mechanical machines, electro-mechanical systems and industrial environments gathered over the past 25 years all over the world; from food factories to “white rooms,” from 18th-century automata to computers, from wood and wires to magnetism, from the microscopic to the monumental. About the work, López states: “Resulting from a massive process of evolution, recombination and spatialization of these materials; merging the “real” with the rise of a new breed of unexistent, magnified, dramatically hyper-real machines; this gargantuan multi-layered creature is all about an extraordinary ontological sonic experience of VirtuAurality in the dark that will put you at the core of the archetypal machine.” 

VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics was originally commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Sónar Festival in 2018.

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures in the realm of experimental music and audio art. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of more than forty years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on a profound listening to the world. He has realized hundreds of sound installations, projects with field recordings, and concerts/performances in over eighty countries, including the main international concert halls, museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), Sónar Festival (Barcelona), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), Spanish Pavillion at the Expo Dubai (United Arab Emirates), etc. His extensive catalogue of sound pieces –with live and studio collaborations, as well as projects curated and directed, with more than a thousand artists– has been released by over 450 recording labels / publishers all over the world. Among other prizes, López has been awarded five times with honorary mentions at the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival (Austria) and is the recipient of a Qwartz Award (France) for best sound anthology. https://franciscolopez.bandcamp.com