On Friday October 13th, Spanish sound-artist and composer Francisco López returns to L.A. after more than two decades, bringing an intense and immersive audio experience – VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics – to a blindfolded audience in the Theater at 2220 Arts + Archives.

Also, Irish audio-visual artist Barbara Ellison makes her L.A. debut with CyberSongs, a phantasmic, transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices and computer-like patterns with human voice. And opening the evening is Hive Mind – the seismic, glacial analog devastations of Greh Holger.

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Internationally acclaimed for the intensity, richness, and astonishing audio detail of his live immersive performances, Spanish composer and audio-artist Francisco López has enthralled blindfolded audiences in darkened rooms worldwide for decades. Ceaselessly recording environments both natural and artificial, López has gathered a deep well of raw material ranging from rainforests to decidedly urban architectures.

VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics utilizes his original recordings of electro-mechanical systems and industrial environments: from food factories to manufacturing “white rooms,” from 18th-century automata to computers, from wood and wires to magnetism, from the microscopic to the monumental. Through a massive process of evolution, recombination, and spatialization of these materials, Lopez merges the “real” into a new breed of nonexistent, magnified, dramatically hyper-real machines. The pieces that Lopez constructs – and deftly diffuses in real-time and space – are decidedly not soundscapes but rather non-representational virtual worlds of sound: “not virtual reality but real virtuality.”


Irish artist and composer Barbara Ellison reveals a ghost in the machine within CyberSongs, her new work for live audio-video performance. Simultaneously using computer-generated text-to-speech voices and computer-like patterns with human voices alike, Ellison reveals how these tools and materials can give rise to an odd and fascinating musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, and - through the intensive and extensive use of repetition – turn into the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns of a transhuman song cycle.