[ reviews ]
26.
knowing when to not know [ • rec. 2001 ][w/ Joe Colley]
> rel. 2001 - miniCD Antifrost, Greece (website)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Francisco López, who is besides an active solo composer, also somebody who collaborates a lot, among others with John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski. Joe Colley might not be a well-known name, but he's the man behind Crawl Unit, and that might ring a few bells. The one piece here started out as a López original which was completed with Joe in California.
About the first few minutes and the last few minutes dabble around in Lópezian silence but the large chunk in the middle is much more audible, and au contraire much of the López music, more electronic in nature. There is a lot of electronic sound processing going on over the original set of environmental recordings. Quite a powerful result, which is a bit too short for me.... A fine small disc. Vital Magazine (The Netherlands, 12/01)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Faisant suite à des productions locales (AS11), le label grec Antifrost, a peu à peu entrouvert les persiennes de son catalogue aux rayons rasants et lumineux de la musique internationale électroacoustique à filiation minimaliste. Un nouveau filtre vient ainsi enrichir la gamme large d'artistes présents (Sachiko M?) en la présence de Francisco López et Joe Coley.
Si on ne présente plus le premier, maître de conférence à l'université de Madrid et chercheur ès-musiques environementales-minimales, voyageur insatiable, photo-reporter du son? le second, Joe Colley, californien, reste moins porté à l'avant-scène. Knowing when to not know, savoir quand on ne sait pas, est un journal de bord dont certaines pages auraient été enrichies le long des berges du pacifique (Sacramento). Travail original de Francisco López, ce petit document sonore a connu les remaniements personnels de Colley. Prenant des détours plus minimalistes (ça commence comme du Bernhard Günter aphone), la composition devient plus aventureuse au fur et à mesure (on a l'impression d'avancer dans un marécage de la selva), même si elle suit un balisage référencé, qui évite les impromptus et les surprises. Une collaboration étroite qui se conjugue avec l'absence de rythmique et qui fait suite aux conversations sonores et épistolaires de Francisco López (sur Geometrik rec) avec David Myers, Illusion of safety, John Hudak, Minoy, Zan Hoffman ou Steeve Peters Une musique nocturne et immergée qui nous mène doucement au centre de la terre. Jade (France, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Third part in the Antifrost series lextreme sound souvenirs?. The recordings from López are worked out by both of them to very intense soundscapes.18 minutes long where longs pieces of silences contrasted with a carefullybuilt up climax. After 2 minutes 13 seconds we hear the first sound fragments. Surrounding sounds from nature, dashing water, rain, windy soundsetc. escalated to a deafening storm that lay down after 11 minutes. On 15 minutes 30 seconds start we back but with samples from snare instrumentswhere East and West seems to meet each other.Intense strong soundscapes this 3" CD. L'Entrepot (Belgium, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Spain's Francisco López is best known for his early work exploring the limits of perception and the grey area between audibility and silence. Of late, though, he's climbed the wall of sound to gain a better vantage point over a sprawling landscape of full-spectrum noise, both on his solo CDs (such as the sublime Untitled #104 for Alien8) and in collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski, John Duncan, Amy Denio and others. On this 3" CD, Sacramento's Joe Colley contributes to an 18-minute piece that crawls out of silence to ascend to a buzzing, dizzying peak before it quickly fades back into nothingness. At its high point, a squall of white noise is rent by arrows of feedback and threaded with ribbons of glistening tone, until the air around you feels as though it bristled with light.
Five minutes before it ends, silence imposes a curfew, but a rebel faction breaks loose,brandishing rattling percussion and snatches of radio fuzz in a soft cacophony of bebop, lounge music and Hawaiian guitar, and the anonymous revelers carouse their way through the darkness ? until they're shot dead with the abrupt end of the CD. Philip Sherburne Needledrops (USA, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Suoni creati da López e manipolati dal californiano Joe Colley in un operazione di trattamento di file audio altrui che sembra ormai essere diventata usuale nell ambito delle musiche digitali di confine. In questo caso il risultato e abbastanza piacevole, non fosse altro per la sintesi in meno di venti minuti di un percorso che dal silenzio passa per diversi stadi di elaborazione, contorsione e ripiegamento, e per la qualita "miossa" e vivace di questo suoni i quali, a confronto con le ultime produzioni di López, appaiono quanto mai sfaccettati, transformati da Colley in un impasto che riesce a coinvolgere per compattezza e vivacita. Blow Up (Italy)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Mini Cd del solito rumorismo di López, stavolta piu ermetico e silenzioso che mai: ci sono microsuoni, correnti improvvise, ma sopratutto silenzi. E' una sequenza nuova a tutti quelli che seguono l'artista spagnolo, in passato capace di far vagare la fantasia in completa assenza di suono. Stavolta la composizione di López e stata manipolata dall americano Colley, ma la quota del suo intervento non è dimostrabile. Spesso si deve avvincare l'orecchio ai diffusori per capire cosa stia succedendo, col solito rischio: il volume che repentinamente si alza, assordandoci all'istante. Il trionfo dell'antimusica. Deep Listenings (Italy, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Here's a nice little disc with a collaboration between two great sound manipulators, Francisco López and Joe Colley, who might be more familiar to some as Crawl Unit. This one track disc starts with the traditional López -style silence with some very minimal sounds in the background, slowly starting to develop and grow into some stronger sound collage, often used by Crawl Unit. The sound collage slowly builds up with some really low rumbling and high pitched frequencies filling the soundscape. After a few minutes, the strong and louder passage returns to where it originally came from and the piece ends with more of that López -style minimalism. This 3"CD is worth getting for the middle part of the track alone, but still I'd like to hear more collaborations between these two. Jukka Mattila (2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
A short and perplexing minidisc here, resulting from what may have been a fleeting encounter between the roaming Spaniard and California-based sound artist Joe Colley. In spite of its extrme abstraction, the work of López never sounds like the product of a man who lives in his studio. Rather, there is always this "outdoor" quality to the music everything reflecting the glories of breathing, waliking and living en plain air. This may be down to the source material he uses (often field recordings), but it also tends to reflect the semi mythical role that is starting to accrue around him: López the voyager like a young Odysseus, flying from coast to coast across a restless ocean, as he ministers to his record label that has three international headquarters. Creating music out of his meetings with people, turning the journeys and the places into acoustic art. But importantly, he always takes the sounds back out into the world, so they become a part of it again. I like the story about this composition having its own "adventures" before it ends up in López's traveller bag. Silence, emptiness, dead air.. the void of nothingness.
Water. Then added layers of treated white noise. "Knowing when to not know" becomes impossibly intense, loud and impenetrable - acquiring an aura of menace. Everything fades away quickly leaving a lonely dissipated sound to blow away helplessly across an empty wasteland. We're stranded in another tract of silence, emptiness and dead air. Then, inexplicably a quiet muffled sound hovers in the air - we can barely hear them but there are instruments, guitars, drums and organ, a fourth rate funk band are playing throught the wrong end of the telescope, dancing like tiny red ants on the antihill. The futility of man's endeavours starts to weigh upon your shoulders. The CD ends abruptly. Finis. The brevity of this composition has not prevented López from realising yet another powerful statement. Ed Pinsent The Sound Projector (UK, May 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Two minutes of almost complete silence begin this track before a slight electrical hum grows into a dense insect-like buzz accompanied by what sounds like a steady rainfall. The density continues to grow into a claustrophobic drone full of blurred masses of sound - a very carefully assembled collage of noises and frequencies, mixing the field recorded sounds of rain and insects with long sustained tones and digitally stretched sounds. The track falls back into almost (but not quite) complete silence again at the 12 minute mark as it coasts to the ending with a perplexing six minutes of silence. Extremely good, and very listenable. www.angbase.com/angbase7/reviews2.html (2002)
Francisco López, who is besides an active solo composer, also somebody who collaborates a lot, among others with John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski. Joe Colley might not be a well-known name, but he's the man behind Crawl Unit, and that might ring a few bells. The one piece here started out as a López original which was completed with Joe in California.
About the first few minutes and the last few minutes dabble around in Lópezian silence but the large chunk in the middle is much more audible, and au contraire much of the López music, more electronic in nature. There is a lot of electronic sound processing going on over the original set of environmental recordings. Quite a powerful result, which is a bit too short for me.... A fine small disc. Vital Magazine (The Netherlands, 12/01)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Faisant suite à des productions locales (AS11), le label grec Antifrost, a peu à peu entrouvert les persiennes de son catalogue aux rayons rasants et lumineux de la musique internationale électroacoustique à filiation minimaliste. Un nouveau filtre vient ainsi enrichir la gamme large d'artistes présents (Sachiko M?) en la présence de Francisco López et Joe Coley.
Si on ne présente plus le premier, maître de conférence à l'université de Madrid et chercheur ès-musiques environementales-minimales, voyageur insatiable, photo-reporter du son? le second, Joe Colley, californien, reste moins porté à l'avant-scène. Knowing when to not know, savoir quand on ne sait pas, est un journal de bord dont certaines pages auraient été enrichies le long des berges du pacifique (Sacramento). Travail original de Francisco López, ce petit document sonore a connu les remaniements personnels de Colley. Prenant des détours plus minimalistes (ça commence comme du Bernhard Günter aphone), la composition devient plus aventureuse au fur et à mesure (on a l'impression d'avancer dans un marécage de la selva), même si elle suit un balisage référencé, qui évite les impromptus et les surprises. Une collaboration étroite qui se conjugue avec l'absence de rythmique et qui fait suite aux conversations sonores et épistolaires de Francisco López (sur Geometrik rec) avec David Myers, Illusion of safety, John Hudak, Minoy, Zan Hoffman ou Steeve Peters Une musique nocturne et immergée qui nous mène doucement au centre de la terre. Jade (France, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Third part in the Antifrost series lextreme sound souvenirs?. The recordings from López are worked out by both of them to very intense soundscapes.18 minutes long where longs pieces of silences contrasted with a carefullybuilt up climax. After 2 minutes 13 seconds we hear the first sound fragments. Surrounding sounds from nature, dashing water, rain, windy soundsetc. escalated to a deafening storm that lay down after 11 minutes. On 15 minutes 30 seconds start we back but with samples from snare instrumentswhere East and West seems to meet each other.Intense strong soundscapes this 3" CD. L'Entrepot (Belgium, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Spain's Francisco López is best known for his early work exploring the limits of perception and the grey area between audibility and silence. Of late, though, he's climbed the wall of sound to gain a better vantage point over a sprawling landscape of full-spectrum noise, both on his solo CDs (such as the sublime Untitled #104 for Alien8) and in collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski, John Duncan, Amy Denio and others. On this 3" CD, Sacramento's Joe Colley contributes to an 18-minute piece that crawls out of silence to ascend to a buzzing, dizzying peak before it quickly fades back into nothingness. At its high point, a squall of white noise is rent by arrows of feedback and threaded with ribbons of glistening tone, until the air around you feels as though it bristled with light.
Five minutes before it ends, silence imposes a curfew, but a rebel faction breaks loose,brandishing rattling percussion and snatches of radio fuzz in a soft cacophony of bebop, lounge music and Hawaiian guitar, and the anonymous revelers carouse their way through the darkness ? until they're shot dead with the abrupt end of the CD. Philip Sherburne Needledrops (USA, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Suoni creati da López e manipolati dal californiano Joe Colley in un operazione di trattamento di file audio altrui che sembra ormai essere diventata usuale nell ambito delle musiche digitali di confine. In questo caso il risultato e abbastanza piacevole, non fosse altro per la sintesi in meno di venti minuti di un percorso che dal silenzio passa per diversi stadi di elaborazione, contorsione e ripiegamento, e per la qualita "miossa" e vivace di questo suoni i quali, a confronto con le ultime produzioni di López, appaiono quanto mai sfaccettati, transformati da Colley in un impasto che riesce a coinvolgere per compattezza e vivacita. Blow Up (Italy)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Mini Cd del solito rumorismo di López, stavolta piu ermetico e silenzioso che mai: ci sono microsuoni, correnti improvvise, ma sopratutto silenzi. E' una sequenza nuova a tutti quelli che seguono l'artista spagnolo, in passato capace di far vagare la fantasia in completa assenza di suono. Stavolta la composizione di López e stata manipolata dall americano Colley, ma la quota del suo intervento non è dimostrabile. Spesso si deve avvincare l'orecchio ai diffusori per capire cosa stia succedendo, col solito rischio: il volume che repentinamente si alza, assordandoci all'istante. Il trionfo dell'antimusica. Deep Listenings (Italy, 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Here's a nice little disc with a collaboration between two great sound manipulators, Francisco López and Joe Colley, who might be more familiar to some as Crawl Unit. This one track disc starts with the traditional López -style silence with some very minimal sounds in the background, slowly starting to develop and grow into some stronger sound collage, often used by Crawl Unit. The sound collage slowly builds up with some really low rumbling and high pitched frequencies filling the soundscape. After a few minutes, the strong and louder passage returns to where it originally came from and the piece ends with more of that López -style minimalism. This 3"CD is worth getting for the middle part of the track alone, but still I'd like to hear more collaborations between these two. Jukka Mattila (2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
A short and perplexing minidisc here, resulting from what may have been a fleeting encounter between the roaming Spaniard and California-based sound artist Joe Colley. In spite of its extrme abstraction, the work of López never sounds like the product of a man who lives in his studio. Rather, there is always this "outdoor" quality to the music everything reflecting the glories of breathing, waliking and living en plain air. This may be down to the source material he uses (often field recordings), but it also tends to reflect the semi mythical role that is starting to accrue around him: López the voyager like a young Odysseus, flying from coast to coast across a restless ocean, as he ministers to his record label that has three international headquarters. Creating music out of his meetings with people, turning the journeys and the places into acoustic art. But importantly, he always takes the sounds back out into the world, so they become a part of it again. I like the story about this composition having its own "adventures" before it ends up in López's traveller bag. Silence, emptiness, dead air.. the void of nothingness.
Water. Then added layers of treated white noise. "Knowing when to not know" becomes impossibly intense, loud and impenetrable - acquiring an aura of menace. Everything fades away quickly leaving a lonely dissipated sound to blow away helplessly across an empty wasteland. We're stranded in another tract of silence, emptiness and dead air. Then, inexplicably a quiet muffled sound hovers in the air - we can barely hear them but there are instruments, guitars, drums and organ, a fourth rate funk band are playing throught the wrong end of the telescope, dancing like tiny red ants on the antihill. The futility of man's endeavours starts to weigh upon your shoulders. The CD ends abruptly. Finis. The brevity of this composition has not prevented López from realising yet another powerful statement. Ed Pinsent The Sound Projector (UK, May 2002)
Francisco López & Joe Colley "Knowing when to not know" (miniCD - Antifrost, 2001)
Two minutes of almost complete silence begin this track before a slight electrical hum grows into a dense insect-like buzz accompanied by what sounds like a steady rainfall. The density continues to grow into a claustrophobic drone full of blurred masses of sound - a very carefully assembled collage of noises and frequencies, mixing the field recorded sounds of rain and insects with long sustained tones and digitally stretched sounds. The track falls back into almost (but not quite) complete silence again at the 12 minute mark as it coasts to the ending with a perplexing six minutes of silence. Extremely good, and very listenable. www.angbase.com/angbase7/reviews2.html (2002)