Francisco López. Ghost Forest

Forests are natural acousmatic environments. The typical intricacy of their structure amplifies the conditions for multi-layered -and sometimes quite complex- sonic phenomena whose sources can hardly be seen.

“Ghost Forest” is a compositional transposition of a multitude of original recordings, made in diverse forests all over the world, into the space of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona. With the aim of creating an immersive environment, the original captured “reality” has been evolved through extreme filtering. This process has been carried out to reveal a ghostly spectrum of frequencies of the transposed forest environments.

The different “spectral” sonic layers are automatically mixed live in the space (in ever-changing combinations) through a special sound system specially designed for this installation. These sounds have been thoroughly worked in the studio as an automatic composition, both for this specific sound system and for the actual space of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion.

Original environmental sound matter recorded at multiple locations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Greece, Japan, Senegal, and the USA between 1990 and 2011. Created at “mobile messor” (Amsterdam, Besançon, The Hague, Barcelona) in 2011-12.

Francisco López (Madrid, 1964) is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For almost forty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.

He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with environmental recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries of the six continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with hundreds of international artists) has been released by nearly 400 record labels / publishers worldwide. He has been awarded four times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.