Cecilia Lopez

Making electronic a full partner in a program, but not letting voltage attributes overwhelm the bass and drums makes Cecilia Lopez’s Red a fascinating aural mixture. The Buenos Aires-born, New York composer/performer uses wire-speaker nets connected to contact microphones and speakers, with the resulting feedback architecturally intensifying the drones and loops project by her electronics plus repetitive textures from Brandon Lopez’s bass and Gerald Cleaver’s drums.

A multimedia artist, Cecilia Lopez has improv experience with the likes of Joe Moffett and Ingrid Laubrock, She needs it since bassist Lopez has worked with committed free players such as Mette Rasmussen and Nate Wooley, while Cleaver has played with almost every major creative musician in Europe and North America.

Red’s architecture is shaped by the nearly unstoppable drones that buzz across and underneath the performance, sometimes creating feedback reflection that operate in tandem with the bass or drums. In the meantime it’s Lopez’s pressurized multi-string spiccato rubs and stops that confirm the bass’s presence among the thickening spatial feedback. Interestingly enough, the performance almost reaches mid-point when Cleaver’s cymbal clatters and pounded ruffs dig a percussion hole in the consistently expanding drones. From then on whenever his rhythm patterning is overpowered by almost opaque feedback it returns to audibility as powerful as before. Drum strokes and swift stops from the bassist join with feedback squeezes to reach a crescendo of concentrated electro-acoustic pulsations during the performance’s penultimate sequence. By the finale, metal scratches, screeching whistles and oscillating echoes settle into an incessant pattern that intermingles all the players’ tones before settling into silence.

An immersive experience as well as a musical narrative, one must be fully immersed in Red (DB) to attain maximum appreciation for it.

–Ken Waxman.

Track Listing: 1. Red (DB)

Personnel: Brandon Lopez (bass); Gerald Cleaver (drums) and Cecilia Lopez (electronics)