Yann Novak and David Vélez Confront Loss Through Field Recording on Two New Albums

Two new releases map grief through sound, transforming raw personal loss into methodical listening experiences. Yann Novak’s Meadowsweet (redux) on Dragon’s Eye and David Vélez’s Loss on Unfathomless share a premise: the ritual of making music from field recordings as a way to endure what Novak calls “the presence of absence.”

Novak’s album returns—and expands—two decades after his mother’s death, the initial version having been created just before her passing. Here, thickly layered environmental sounds trace rooms and gardens where a person once lingered. The opening piece, “A Hard Drive,” assembles almost imperceptible noises until a garbled female voice surfaces, as if the listener is straining alongside Novak to hold a fading resonance. Tracks bleed together into a reverie, then fade, mirroring memory’s fragile contour.

Vélez’s project takes a different shape. Following his father’s death in 2024, he spent four hours every afternoon for three months, using sine waves, objects, and field recordings to build an artistic response to what he describes as pointless yet necessary mourning. Drawing on Camus’s reading of Sisyphus, he treats grief as an act that becomes endurable when it turns ritual.

Neither album offers consolation as much as a kind of witness. The music rarely rises above a hushed intensity, but its accumulations can become overwhelming—a quiet, persistent ache that feels less like an escape from loss than a way of sitting inside it.