Nicholas HOPKINS Nicky HIND Cem DURUÖZ (guitar in Ripples) Stéphane ROY Celso AGUIAR Jonathan NORTON Back to the Index

Fernando LOPEZ-LEZCANO Three Dreams Paper Castles, Invisible Clouds, Electric Eyes Fernando Lopez-Lezcano (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1956) received a Master's in Electronic Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires and a Master's in Music from the Carlos Lopez Buchardo National Conservatory. He began working with electroacoustic music by building his own analog synthesizers and four-channel studio around 1976. After graduating, he worked in the electronic industry as hardware and software design engineer, specializing in the design and implementation of real-time embedded microprocessor-controlled systems (at the same time keeping up with music at night and on weekends). He spent one year at CCRMA as visiting composer as part of an exchange program between LIPM in Argentina, CCRMA and CRCA at UCSD. He carried out research and taught electronic music for one year at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University, Japan, and is now lecturer and system administrator of the computer resources at CCRMA. His music has been released on CDs and played in the Americas, Europe and East Asia. This piece is about impossible dreams. Time and time again, without learning from past experience, we build beautiful Paper Castles on an apparently solid foundation of Invisible Clouds, thinking that dreams are one and the same as reality, or maybe that they can be turned into reality through sheer will power and the wave of a magical wand. The first two sections, Paper Castles and Invisible Clouds, overlap in time and are like twin brothers, intermingled yet separate. As for the third and last part, Electric Eyes, if you have ever felt the startling contact of electric eyes, the almost magnetic link that comes into being with just a glance, there is no need for me to explain. If you have not, mere words will never be enough... That's my dream and the cause of a lot of Paper Castle building activities...The piece was originally composed for four-channel tape and was rendered in the digital domain using the CLM non-real-time sound synthesis and processing environment running on NeXT computers (CLM, Common Lisp Music, was written by Bill Schottstaedt at CCRMA). The four-channel spatialization was performed by a custom unit generator (dlocsig) programmed by the composer. All concrete sound materials are derived from sampled tubular bells, cowbells, cymbals, gongs, knives scratching metal plates and screams. The synthetic sounds were rendered through quite simple additive synthesis instruments.