The Things that Objects Can Tell Us About Ourselves
Sonic Arts Composition
Published by Faming Pines
July 18, 2018
Listen/Purchase here
https://flamingpines.bandcamp.com/album/the-things-that-objects-can-tell-us-about-ourselves
Teaching Foley to film and art students is one of the most significant learning experiences in my work with sound. There is something special and intriguing about accentuating, suggesting and creating fictions by manipulating objects that have engaged me into this practice. The obsolescence of Foley as a result of the emergence of sound banks and galleries opens the door to a universe of new aesthetic possibilities.
In my studio I gathered a series of objects based on their musical potency to suggest places, situations and actions. I looked for objects capable of producing powerful resonances, objects that with just a little push could resonate for long periods of time by spinning or bouncing, and objects that I could break producing harsh, compelling and potent sonorities.
From a musical perspective, the falling and breaking of objects has been the subject of many of my performances, mainly because destruction could become a poetic and metaphoric action where elements such as fragility, vulnerability and transience can be reflected on it. A workshop that I directed in October 2016 to create sound effects for a wrestling match became very influential in this process.
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REVIEWS
Vélez draws on his work teaching Foley sound production (the adding of sound effects to film in post-production) to construct a dense, rich world with various objects of metallic and other natures. The single track, almost 50 minutes, begins in woolly atmospherics only to be abruptly shattered by a huge bang, as if an enormous, heavy but fragile object has been dropped from height into the room, exploding on impact. From there, we traverse a number of “episodes”, all pretty densely packed (though the dynamic range is wide, there’s little in the way of silence here), all conveying a wealth of sonic information. Often, there are pulses or other subtle iterative elements that provide some forward thrust–a steady, echoing pounding here, a thin, bell-like tone, as from a distant train-crossing signal, there. The traditions are entirely natural sounding, like walking from room to room, always with a sense of the same “air”, just varying activity taking place. While, active, it’s never busy, conveying a sense intent and urgency but with an almost non-human aspect–very enjoyable. Items are dropped, blown into, rolled, stepped on–everything works, all embedded within a convincing world, one that occasionally allows the outside to seep in. Good work.
-Brian Olewnick / Just Outside
By now music by David Velez has been reviewed quite a bit and many of these are works of collaboration. Velez is from Columbia and has lived in New York. Field recordings certainly play an important role in his music, but he also uses objects in concerts, installations and composition. From the cover I understand he is also teaching Foley to film and art students; production of sound that go along with films. You smash some cauliflower while on screen Hannibal is chopping men’s liver. That sort of thing. For Velez destruction of objects is quite important, as it can “become a poetic and metaphoric action where elements such as fragility, vulnerability and transience can be reflected on it”. Velez compiled this new release from various concerts in which he plays objects. I assume these recordings are superimposed on top of each other and while you could think that the destruction of acoustic objects could easily lead into a massive amount of stamped on plastic cups, say the sort of things The Haters or The New Blockaders would use, Velez doesn’t use any electronics (or at least not to the extent a true noise band would do), but keeps it mostly acoustic. Surely there is quite some reverb from time to time, but otherwise sounds are as natural as they come, I think. There is one piece here, clocking at some fifty minutes, which is divided into various sections. The element of destruction isn’t that clear to me, as it sounds like a long improvisation on a variety of metallic objects, which Velez plays rather carefully. It is all very electro-acoustic, probably more acoustic than electro of course, which reminded me of some of the live work of Kapotte Muziek. It seems also to me that Velez might use some field recordings to go along with his playing or perhaps it is just some extensive layering of sounds. There is a beautiful tranquillity to the music; everything seems to be moving in a rather slow pace. That adds further to me thinking carefully about the whole element of destruction. Sometimes there is just some sort of drone lingering about, and the music becomes quieter than it already is, especially in the second half. All of this worked very well for me, destruction or otherwise. Sometimes it sounds like Velez is a percussion player in some improvisation set-up, and at other times the explorer of more musique concrete like textures and sounds.
-Vital Weekly
Introducing things on a soothing note is a gentle drone. David Veléz literally blasts the listener out of their comfort zone with a sound that is incredibly startling, outright a full-on assault on the senses. It is the aftermath of that where the piece truly begins, for the multiple layers of sound go for a tremendous tactile quality. Field recordings reign supreme, yet David Veléz also makes sure to give these a little bit of shape. Various mechanical and industrial sounds float about, showing true love for the unknowably vast space. Bringing it full circle David Veléz eventually returns to that pastoral open, yet it feels completely different after the whole piece has unfurled.
“The Things That Objects Can Tell Us About Ourselves” reveals David Veléz to have a painterly precision to his art.
-Beach Sloth
Unique for field recordists, Vélez credits inspiration to teaching foley to film and art students. In the reigning digital age, foley is the endangered art of creating fictions by manipulating physical objects. Equipped with a microphone instead of a brush, the interplay with his subject mirrors that of a studio painter. First, he selects objects based on their “musical potency to suggest places, situations and actions.” He then manipulates them by spinning, bouncing, or breaking, turning resonant objects into impromptu drum kits.
Quite fittingly, the physicality of his process struck (literally) while directing a foley workshop for a wrestling match. (Although costumes are unavoidable, there are no punches pulled in the ring of life.) The Things That Objects Can Teach Us About Ourselves advances a theme developed in Unseen Terror, exploring how sound can embody “the stances of catastrophe: anticipation, strike, and aftermath.” Unseen Terror ends with the smashing of a wooden chair; The Things That Objects Can Teach Us About Ourselves begins with the breaking of a window.
While Vélez may not be a psychologist, he studies themes familiar to the trade: contingency (sounds of weather), dissonance (machine noise), and fragility (scraping or breaking objects): “More than the relation between chaos and nature what interests me is the relation between man and nature, the way they clash and the way they co-exist.” Man remains an object among objects—an object prone to breaking. Humanity’s dilemma endures: contact with the world creates friction; the absence of contact, however, also creates conflict.
Balancing tension and release, Things That Objects Can Teach Us About Ourselves builds connections with the world which lean outward like the forward slash. In common convention, slashes establish connections in dates and fractions; in computing; and even in verse division. In the less familiar sound worlds of David Vélez, slashes become ruptures of consciousness, helping us reckon with the mystery of our surroundings, the mystery of ourselves, asking us to lean into his questions, deeper still, until…
-A Closer Listen
The things that objects can tell us about ourselves is his new release on the Flaming Pines label and is inspired by his teaching of foley and sound design for film. It also revisits previous ideas he has explored, most notably that of forming a narrative through a process of destruction. Vélez says in reference to this aesthetic approach, “To destroy objects has always been important in my work as a way to transform matter through very emotional and redeeming actions.”
“Unseen Terror” from 2013 was an installation that involved the physical destruction of a dining table and chairs, and attempted to answer the artist’s questions regarding the convergence of structural, sculptural and sonic perceptions of space.
This new piece finds Vélez harvesting the sounds of his foley work, rewoven into a narrative of hyper-tactile soundscapes. The physicality of these recordings are layered with ominous drones that act like threads meshing through the more brittle noises and knitting them together. Other recordings were made while his stay at an artist residency in France. He attended the studios of sculptors Danilo Duenas and Veronica Lehner, whose daily workplace sounds he gathered. Besides the scraping of hands on clay, he also witnessed the sculptors own destructive practices and made audio recordings of them tearing down walls and the clattering of nails and a hammer. More destruction, more material to fill Vélez’s sound palette.
So onto the piece itself. A barely perceptible sine tone begins this 50-minute audio journey, slow and quiet. This near-silence is suddenly shattered by a cracking of glass, jolting the listener into a focused attention of the new soundscape. It really acts as an attention-grabbing moment, right at the start. Glass continues to crackle before industrial, machine-like sounds make an appearance. These kind of sounds are fairly prominent on this piece, metallic and mechanic.
Pipes and hollow objects are struck, creating rhythmic patterns that lend a head-nodding quality to the middle section of the piece. These looped phrases are where his found sounds are at their most musical, the differing pitches of bottles and other objects acting like notes on a scale. Other portions of the piece have the atmosphere of abandoned warehouse spaces, ghostly room tones and the echoes of empty industrial sites. These offer moments of subdued calm, but there is a remaining tension, almost paranoia in their eeriness. It’s ambient, but with the chance of chaos around every corner.
The final 10 minutes finds Vélez’s microphone leaving these interiors and venturing out into nature. Bird calls and distant traffic sounds provide a brief respite, before dissolving into muted tones and smaller, but still physical sounds, a warm drone taking us back to where we were at the start, 50 minutes ago. The things that objects can tell us about ourselves is a testament to Vélez’s artistic vision of creating from chaos, the destruction of objects giving birth to new sounds. This tactility is often missing from experimental ambient work, but is the absolute focus here.
-Toneshift
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