Francisco Lopez Lopez Island Elevator Bath CD Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $14.00 It's hard not to comment on the solipsism of Lopez Island, considering that the bulk of Francisco Lopez' recordings are of the untitled-plus-number variety. Yet, during the winter of 1999 – 2000, he did in fact go to a locale called Lopez Island, which can be found in the Puget Sound in the American Pacific Northwest, and he did return with his field recordings saturated with the damp tactility that the region is known for in wintertime. Throughout the beginning 20 minutes of the album, Lopez temporarily drops his acousmatic strategies in favor of very loosely processed field recordings with rain and sleet tapping against sodden turf and decomposing leaves. With a fizzing transition into a chorus of distant moans by a family some nocturnal creature, Lopez fades the album to black for a few minutes before he tuning up his signature austerity of recontextualized field recordings cast in monolithic grey.