David Velez recognizes the sense of performance inherent in everyday life. He’s in particular interested in the performance that is part and parcel of repetitive tasks, a matter that isn’t necessarily something its enactors are even conscious of. Velez recently released a musically enlivened field recording of “industrial processes” via the impulsivehabitat.com netlabel. Titled Funza, it is a 40-plus-minute exploration of ordinariness, an ordinariness that is lightly augmented with musical tones, much like a documentary film that has a proper score and that occasionally implements editing techniques rooted in fictional drama (MP3).
[audio:http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/017/ihab017-01-david_velez_-_funza.mp3|titles=”Funza”|artists=David Velez]
Writes Velez of his undertaking:
Part of my job involves taking photographs of industrial processes to illustrate a series of manuals with production instructions and guidelines that the company gives to the machine operators. Parallel to taking the photographs. I capture the sounds from those processes most of them involving steam and pneumatic powered machines whose sonorities I found quite interesting for their percussive nature and their high pitched textures respectively. These recordings reveal an interesting obvious and irrelevant phenomena that captures my interest: parallel to making a product, the operator is performing a sound score using the machines as instruments. The operator is unadvisedly reading and performing a score unadvisedly written and encoded in the instructions and guidelines. While aware of “a performance” I advisedly record it.
Track originally posted at impulsivehabitat.com.