Belgian impresario Daniel Crokaert keeps the flame burning for the field recording genre with his label Unfathomless. One of two recent releases here from 19/03/2026. David Vélez is the distinctive talent from Colombia now living in Huddersfield, who made the unusual record Beta Vulgaris by processing the sound of plants growing and did it again on Comfort Food more recently.
On Loss (UNFATHOMLESS U93) he’s going down a slightly more tangible route, exhibiting an interest in ventilation systems and pipes, plus fuse boxes and computer drives, electing to record whatever sound events he finds using hydrophones and geophone microphones. There’s also a “studio improv” dimension to the record, where he “plays” a number of small objects (marbles, cups, springs) and reprocesses the sounds through a digital sine tone generator. It’s interesting to hear what this most ecological of fellows does with a more industrial environment; we always appreciated his holistic vision of the vegetable kingdom and his unfailingly optimistic messages about the life-giving properties of plants.
Listeners will be enheartened to learn he hasn’t forgotten his primary motivations, and a certain amount of Loss was recorded outside in Holme Mills and the Colne river. Holme Mills is an industrial estate, but I get the impression it’s going down the “gentrification” route like a lot of sites around the north of the UK, and what once were bakeries and textile factories are now becoming much-needed artisan coffee roasters, juice bars, and micro-breweries. In presenting these audio interpretations of his surroundings, David Vélez does indeed create rich and compelling layers and textures, almost mesmerising in their strange intensity. Yet the results are also oddly anonymous and non-specific; they could almost have been derived from any modern industrial area in the world. The fascinating pull of ventilation systems and similar machines has been of interest to Mark Vernon, and others such as Martin Kay, who did it at Melbourne Cricket Ground, or Juan José Calarco who did it on the railway in Buenos Aires, or Gary Rouzer in America who just likes old fans.
It’s also worth hearing what Vélez does when he’s let loose with digital processing, an extremely common way of working these days; he exhibits characteristic restraint, which is what I recall enjoying about his minimal beetroot records, and once he finds a setting that’s working, he sees no need to change anything.