La Selva

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I can't decide what is more surprising about La Selva. Is it that López, whose work is usually all but silent, has created an album that is quite audible at even the lowest volumes? Or is it that La Selva is not just audible but also a dense and powerful Tudor-de-force of reconstructed rainforest sounds? As with López's Azoic Zone, a fathomless sub-aquascape, La Selva's Equatorial environment is not so much a location recording as it is a superb piece of set-design. In this sense, it can be seen as a sequel to another López forest construction, Addy en El Pas de las Frutas y los Chunches. López has less in common with such sonic ethnographers as Chris Watson than he does with "virtual naturalists" such as Bill Fontana. As real as López's rainforest sounds, with its torrential downpours, twittering birds, scolding monkeys, rustling leaves, and suffocating clouds of humming and chirring insects, this La Selva can not be located on any map. It's pure fabrication. In reality, this tropical menagerie and these mercurial stormsóthough all represent the taped traces of actual lives and eventsóhave never occupied the same temporal space. Edited from recordings made during rainy seasons a year apart, López's 70-minute work never gives the faintest indication of digital tampering or other audio-artifice The illusion of La Selva is seamless. López takes obvious pride in a representational ultra-realism that shies away from obvious signifiers or staged spectacle. Even the unseen beast who wanders into the scene at 40:25 and adds his mournful, hacking howl to the score is not reading from any script. The miracle of La Selva is that it is entirely constructed and yet completely instantaneous. It is also never the same experience twice. Play La Selva at daybreak on a wet morning, with the window open, allowing Lopez's environments to absorb the birdsong and cicada chirps from outside. Become a part of the magic.