Live Review: Francisco López

Conceptual sound artist Francisco López is in Brisbane for his fourth visit, here as part of the Room 40-curated Open Frame Festival. As with previous shows, the audience is handed blindfolds as they enter the performance space and asked to sit facing away from the artist and towards the quadraphonic speakers settled in the corners of the room. López introduces his set briefly and explains that while the blindfolds are not mandatory, they are recommended: they focus the listeners' attention and emphasise the sense of a shared ritual.

Blindfolds on, the crowd settles and the performance begins. López's previous tours here have explored tonality – drone intense enough to fold the listener inside the notes. Tonight, instead, the emphasis is on heavily processed natural sounds, and the result is initially much less comforting. Quiet white noise, like sparks of electricity, begins the set, spraying out from around the room. A particularly sharp, loud burst of static erupts from the nearest speaker menacingly. The burst recurs throughout the piece, but there's no consistent pattern to its re-emergence and so repetition does little to dull the shock, and every instance creates the same jolt of adrenalin. This ensures a consistent state of attentiveness: if the mind drifts and the music fades to background noise, that single stab of static causes a refocusing, a return to a state of active listening. As the rest of the composition swells and becomes louder, the work gains a certain peacefulness, a strange beauty emerging from the white noise as it settles around the listener like a gentle snow.

When the first piece ends, fading back out from loud wash-of-noise to individual judders breaking the silence, the sound of the room itself becomes the performance. The air-conditioner, imperceptible before the show began, now seems almost shockingly loud: a high whine of engine and air that continues well into the second piece, until that too swells to drown out the surroundings.

The blindfold may create a sense of shared ritual, but it also serves to isolate each person, stripping away the shared space. The sounds bounce around the room, flitting across speakers, causing the listener to attempt to follow the noise; to make sense of what is occurring outside the imposed blindness. Are the pops gunfire or fireworks? Threat or spectacle? There are no visual cues to indicate when a piece has ended, or is about to change, and it becomes clear how much context and sight affect our ability to interpret audio. Stripped of that easy understanding, every sound, even silence, becomes fraught with potential.

When the blindfold comes off, the shock of light from the exit sign is painful. Even as the room comes into focus, a sense of dislocation remains: confusion at the sudden influx of stimuli. On the journey home, sound takes on new meaning – the gentle drip of water in a pipe creates a rhythm while the idling engine of a bus, the lap of river water and the cry of bats fill out the music of the world around us, revealed, at least for a little while.