-stat.ic soundlabs: Francisco López/Carsten Nicolai

In the last twenty years, Francisco López has been developing a consistent world of minimal electro acoustic soundscapes, ‘trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrète music’. The evolution of his aesthetics and conceptual background is a profound process of refinement towards an extreme musical purism, with a voluntary refusal of any visual, procedural, relational, semantic, functional or virtuosistic elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerful musical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadful abysms of crude strengthness and the most subtle and diffuse aural edges. He calls it belle confusion. The Berlin based artist/musician Carsten Nicolai uses electronic sound and visual art as a kind of hybrid tool to create his own microscopic view of creative processes. His world looks more like a laboratory, constantly morphing in space and time, influenced by the impulses of this media world and in which sound (the message as code) becomes the primary theme. Through the use of looping oscillators, tone generators and modem sounds, Nicolai makes audible the essence of pure electricity. This is not to say that his work is primarily auditory; visual elements are as much part of the sonic experience as sound itself. Nicolai’s insistent experiments on the borders of sound and vision are marked by a stimulating and refreshing approach to both subjects, without ever losing his grip on them.