SONM

SONM. Francisco López

Francisco López, director of SONM, the experimental music and sound art audio library: The SONM experimental music and sound art audio library was created from my private experimental music collection, but, paradoxically, it is not the result of collecting. I’m not a collector, but over the last three decades, I’ve been exchanging sound material – recordings made using all sorts of formats – with artists from around the world and I’m still doing that today.

This collection is the result of those exchanges and collaborations with other artists as well, and that’s what produced this archive.

I set this archive up because I believe that this enormous amount of material should be available to the public and should also generate all kinds of new activities and work. I found the perfect place with public access for the library at the Puertas de Castilla centre in Murcia. Then in 2010 I started working on creating the library, which meant conserving and digitalising all the material. Since the initial start-up phase, we’ve been working on the enormous task of cataloguing all this material in a database according to international standards, but using our own format for our work and to provide access to the public.

The library was designed to house this abundance of information for the public to listen to. The relationships behind this truly popular archive are very personal. The immense amount of material in the archive really results from direct, personal exchanges.

One of the most basic ideas is the generation of new activities and inspiration in every sense of the word. The situation today is completely different to what it was like in the beginning. Because of the huge amount of work we’ve done, the material has been conserved and anyone can search for information in the internal database or online on the webpage, which offers various search options for the information. One way is a random function in the listening section, a parallel webpage where users register and can listen to almost all the material, except in explicit cases with certain artists who don’t want their material to be streamed.

In addition to online education, dissemination and promotion via the listening section, from the very beginning, we’ve promoted a series of activities at the library itself. As part of a guest artist programme, we’ve invited several artists to come to the cultural centre in Murcia to take part in different activities, including classic activities like concerts and sound installations. The vast majority of these artists do a seminar or a presentation of their work or some of the aspects they’re working on.

We’ve done a series of activities where we invite artists-in-residence to work with the library materials, using the archives however it suits them. They recombine, remix or restructure different materials, eventually producing a podcast that we make available on the webpage and can be used as a radio programme.

In another set of activities that we call researchers-in-residence, we invite different people who work in a way that could be called theoretical, reflecting on the history of experimental music, aesthetics and the social aspects of the practice of experimental music and sound art. In this programme, the researchers work in the archive for a period of time that varies from one to the other, in the end producing something in manuscript form. We match the archive’s materials with the interests of each researcher. I try to encourage relatively young researchers with a less traditional, less academic perspective and background.

We’ve also published a few CD and DVD projects done in Murcia by local artists as well as some by international artists from different countries.

All of these activities together show the possibilities inherent in this kind of archive in terms of generating many types of activities and new ideas and creations.

I think that the audio library is capable of changing how sound production is understood today in terms of documentation. When you hear what was being done many years ago, you realize that some things were invented well in the past. This is not a criticism of what’s being done today. Many independent artists are beginning to work very intuitively, maybe repeating what was done before without even knowing it.