Francisco Lopez
Report from the Amazon

March 6, 2009
Suzanne Thorpe

In November and December of 2008 a small group of field recordists and sound artists traveled to the Brazilian Amazon. Their destination was Mamori Lake, where they partaicipated in an extraordinarily unique two-week residency program at the Mamori Sound Project. Conceived and directed by Francisco López, the residency had a special focus on creative approaches to field recordings, realized through an extensive exploration of natural sound environments within the Brazilian Rainforest. The goal of the workshop was to develop and realize a collective project of sonic creation with all participating artists, as well as individual projects.

Mamori Lake

Director Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the experimental music and sound art scene. He is also a Ph.D. ecosystem biologist, who regularly teaches in Spain and Latin America. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings spans over a period of more than 25 years. Following are two interviews with Lopez, one just prior to his trip, describing the forthcoming residency, and a few words about his experience post-expedition.

Lopez describes the Mamori Sound Project

Upon Lopez's return he declared his trip "amazing!" He continues say that "the residency/workshop is an intense combination of field work, studio work, discussions, creation and adventure in the rainforest. This year I had two groups of sound artists / composers, each for two weeks, with about ten people. We have a pretty intense schedule with work during the day and night. The environment around Mamori Lake, where the residency/workshop takes place, is a beautiful tropical rainforest teeming with life. Frog choruses are particularly interesting and complex, and they typically become one of the goals of our field work at night, in all their different combinations and awsome complexity. Another typical challenge in this environment is to get a recording of the elusive howler monkeys."

Lopez goes on to observe that "there is a myriad of other things happening there, of course, and I try to provide the opportunities for the participants to be able to hear and record as wide a variety of sound matter as possible. The focus of this project is creative and every participant creates his or her own piece by the end of it. I believe this is a particularly interesting situation in which a group of artists work with basically the same sound materials. This reveals in an unusual and straightforward way the creative skills of every participant."

Lopez capturing rainforest sounds

Lopez describes his experience of being in a rainforest as a "transformative experience." In answer to a query posed by sound sculptor Lawrence English, he states that "the rainforest is a naturally acousmatic space, where a myriad of sounds can be continuously heard but we rarely see the sources of all that awsome sonic richness and complexity. In this kind of environment I got used to listening in a very profound way, recognizing nuances and detail in space and time in a hyper-realistic manner. But also, and very importantly, I realized about the dramatic difference between listening as a semantic activity or as a phenomenological experience. This difference is magnified by doing recordings and contrasting the extractions of reality we can get that weigh against our memory of the experience, and against the phenomenological substance of the newly recorded sonic-and-perceptive reality, which can stand on its own. I believe that rainforest environments are particularly suited for this because of their sonic diversity, complexity and interweaving of phenomena, which creates an experience of sound as matter instead of individual entities."