Comfort Food by David Vélez

"In these compositions I aim to bring forth the bliss, lusciousness and vibrancy that I find in growing, cooking and eating these plants." - David Vélez.

An album produced from the hiss of cooking oil, the rumble of water coming to the boil, the vibrations of earthworms in soil, and the sine waves David Vélez broadcasts to nurture the plants he grows and cooks.

FP is delighted to present Comfort Food a high point in Vélez's distinctive explorations of the manifold and multiple resonances between food and sound.

As Jane Bennett reminds us food "as a self-altering, dissipative materiality, is also a player. It enters into what we become. It is one of the many agencies operative in the moods, cognitive dispositions, and moral sensibilities that we bring to bear as we engage the questions of what to eat, how to get it, and when to stop."

In bringing sound to plants and field recording to cooking and gardening Vélez offers us not only food for thought in these compositions, but his own unique aural rendering of care, connection and growth.

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Some words introducing the themes of the release by David:

"I home-grow vegetables to cook and feed on, providing solace and allowing me to experience joy even under adverse circumstances, administering much-needed warmth, nutrients and flavour.

Food is also the subject and substance of my sonic art as I
cultivate tomatoes, rhubarbs and beets stimulated by compositions using sine waves, which help them absorb nutrients by opening their pores, facilitating transpiration, breathing and diffusion.

I also record the soil where these vegetables grow in acoustically isolated pots using miniature hydrophones and geophones, detecting the subtle and almost imperceptible sounds of earthworms. I also record the preparation of the recipes I cook with these vegetables, which I approach looking for compelling textures, patterns, rhythms and noises.

This album explores these food sounds with the aim of providing solace through soothing repetitive harmonic elements generated from the sine tones to which plants are sensitive, the sonic textures of cooking itself and my recordings of soil sounds. In these compositions I aim to bring forth the bliss, lusciousness and vibrancy that I find in growing, cooking and eating these plants.

The name of the three pieces refers to the vital nutrients in soil necessary for edible plants' growth and development."
--- David Vélez on Comfort Food.


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David Vélez (PhD) is a Colombian sonic artist studying the acoustics of food, working in the intersection between sound ethnography and plant bioacoustics. His work oversteps the boundaries of installation art, field recordings, composition, performance and commensality exploring gardens, kitchens and open food markets as exhibition spaces. Vélez is interested in the strategic artistic possibility of sound and its invisible, immersive, unstable and fluctuating material, attributes shared with the nourishing transference of energy in food.

“Flaming Pines is itself a topography of hidden global sounds." The Wire.

We are a label focused on field recording, sound art and experimental ambient music.

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