LOPEZ, CECILIA - Red / Machinic Fantasies

"Cecilia Lopez's work is a perfect combination of flavors that slowly reveal themselves as you spend more time enjoying it. It has marvelous layers of sonic explorations that slowly unfold and draw you in. Red is more than a musical composition. It roots lie in its physicality. Nestled on a large cargo-like cable web are an array of small speakers and contact microphones. As this web sways the speakers and microphones come in and out of proximity and form an evolving feedback network, which slowly reveal themselves as a myriad of permutations accompanied by sympathetic synthesizer tones. Zero-input mixing works seem to be very popular now, but Red takes feedback further, beyond the electronic domain, by its use of a multi-faceted instrument creating a sonic architecture intertwined with the resonances of acoustical spaces. Her Machinic Fantasies, a kind of performed installation, explores another set of instruments she has constructed using two hand-rotated, 55-gallon drums each having a speaker inside with multiple cutouts that act as acoustical filters. Her sound materials, derived from field recordings to spoken word and live acoustic/electronic instruments, are fed into the oil drums and emanate through the holes and are at the same time amplified using microphones placed near the rotating holes. Driven by a detailed score, this recording resulted from a music commission at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York combining the two rotating drum instruments with instrumentalists Jean Carla Rodea, Julia Santoli, Christopher McIntyre, and Joe Moffett. Machinic Fantasies also has multiple dimensions with the resonances of the performance space excited by the instruments, the musicians weaving their sounds into the space from different locations, and the ongoing physical rotations of the spinning drums to create a swirling almost hypnotic music." - XI.