Triumphantly unfazed by the fact that it is no longer 1950, Francisco López has birthed a sprawling and ambitious double album of undiluted, unabashed musique concrète. Machines is industrial music in the purist sense, as López limited himself strictly to recordings taken from various pieces of mechanical equipment, then masterfully sculpted them into meticulously composed symphonies of clanking and whirring machinery.
Machines consists of four commissioned pieces recorded in various European cities over a span of three years. Each piece is devoted to a specific type of machinery, though López often utilizes recordings taken from more than one site. For example, “Fabrikas” is composed entirely of factory sounds recorded in Latvia, but the source material covers a chocolate factory, a beer factory, a vintage bicycle workshop, and a speaker workshop. Notably, López does not conspicuously treat the raw recordings in any way, so everything sounds like exactly what it is and there is no effort to add any “musical” elements at all. As such, the song titles are very literal and accurate: “Clocks” is essentially 32 minutes of ticking clocks and nothing else. That is not an inherently attractive premise for a piece of music, but Francisco’s deft layering of field recordings transforms it into something quite hypnotic.
Aside from López’s singular adherence to thematic and acousmatic purity, the most striking aspect of these recordings is their length. Machines clocks in at 2 ½ hours, which presents quite an endurance test for listeners. I attempted to make it through the entire thing a couple of times on my headphones, but never made it further than 20 minutes—it is simply too subtle and slowly evolving to hold my direct, undivided attention for the enormous amount of time required. However, when I have had this album on while doing something else, I have frequently found myself utterly engrossed and struck by the numerous moments in which the rumbling and humming coheres into something strangely beautiful. Of course, this is music as art, not music as entertainment, so listenability was presumably not a motivating factor in the assembling and sequencing of this release. Instead, Machines is a document that captures one of the world’s premier sound artists at the top of his game. The intricate webs of waxing and waning loops and subtle convergences of tempo are nothing short of ingenious.
Essentially, Machines is a fascinating high-wire act and a significant music event. There are very few musicians that I am aware of that could turn 45 minutes of field recordings of German elevators into something compelling and worthwhile (and probably none that would actually exert the effort to do so). While many of the environments sampled lend themselves to harsh sounds and heavy, crunching rhythms, there is ultimately very little dissonance in Francisco’s finished sound collages. The bulk of the material collected here is quite surprisingly warm and enveloping, particularly the hissing and humming laboratory and factory pieces that make up the second disc. Machines is certainly a stunning creative and technical achievement, but it also works quite effectively as an epic mechanized lullaby.
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