Francisco López and Xabier Erkizia, Elektra Bidasoa, Ferns Recordings, CD ferns_stem_02 (2011)
Environmental field recording expert Francisco López teams up with Xabier Erkizia to go a-sailing down the Bidasoa river in the Basque country to capture the sounds of hydroelectric power plants and then independently convert these recordings into two sets of abstract experimental musique concrète / drone ambience. López quests for a detached approach in which noise textures gradually change and evolve into something almost organic though very machine-like and Erkizia converts his sounds into a more lively pair of noisescapes.
As with many of his recordings, López’s two contributions are merely numbered and they are very cool and calm in delivery. Grainy noise patterns pass smoothly, one into another, while rhythm-like structures are provided by machines at work within the plants, marking out time perhaps or the various processes involved in channeling water past humming turbines. It seems that even the silence between tracks is very significant; here, it is very suggestive of going underwater deep down, as far down as the river-bed goes. The machines take on an alien life of their own, mysterious, clinical and inaccessible to humans; it’s serene and steady though of course unemotional and in that, quite creepy and intimidating. The last few minutes of “Untitled #267” are perhaps the most sinister for they are at sub-audible levels and are characterised by twitchy clicks and hisses that stalk the blackness.
Erkizia’s contributions are much, much more dramatic and startling: he includes flowing turbulent water as well as near-silent hisses and unsettling ambience in his two works. There is much more tension in the series of sounds as it flips from water sluicing through channels to more steady crumbly noise mini-showers to periods of quiet hum and the odd whisk of grit and electronic twitch. Probably the most dynamic part of the whole disc comes at the start of “Bidasoa, presak” where several layers of noise texture proceed and you could almost swear that there are voices in there somewhere: the piece at this point might have come from an black metal / noise ambient fusion recording.
It would have been a more interesting recording if the two artists had included a track where their separate recordings are combined and perhaps remixed by a third person who could add his/her own touches and distortions to the found sounds. As it is, “Elektra Bidasoa” suggests López hasn’t changed his approach much since I last heard him nearly a decade ago and Erkizia’s own work is too choppy and can’t quite make up for short-comings in the other’s tracks. Very little of the awesome power of the hydroelectric power plants is conveyed and there’s no sense of the huge volumes of water that must rush through them each day.
Contact: Ferns Recordings, Francisco Lopez, Xabier Erkizia