Species Loneliness

"I wanted to revisit the sound worlds of 1970s eco-horror films, a time of growing fears about environmental consequences. Today, we no longer fear the revenge of frogs or insects; we are mourning their vanishing. My music channels the eerie, anticipatory dread of those films into a contemporary lament for what's been lost and a search for what might still be restored." — Ludwig Berger

Leading up to his first 'fictional' album "Garden of Ediacara", which will be released on May 3rd via -OUS, landscape sound artist Ludwig Berger presents the EP "Species Loneliness".

Building on an extensive and acclaimed body of work in sound art, field recordings, installation and performance, as well as music for film and theatre, the EP "Species Loneliness" and the subsequent album "Garden of Ediacara" mark a shift in Berger's creative work. But as he enters the realm of 'fictional' music by engaging with environmental emotions, he still relies on his far-reaching practice as a close listener and archivist of unheard sounds.

With "Species Loneliness", Berger explores a yearning for interspecies connection on a damaged planet. The six track EP presents a set of muted songs that are haunted by echoes of eco-horror and eco-gothic films of the past century, while interwoven raw field recordings create the space to breathe. The tracks center around the term of "Species Loneliness" — an ecological form of isolation and solitude. It expresses the paradox of "homesickness at home", a feeling of absence that permeates our surrounding landscapes and environments, arising from the loss of natural habitats and the decline of biodiversity. Through layers of degraded samples, eco-nostalgia runs through the EP, longing for meaningful relationships obscured in the shadows of the Anthropocene.

Ludwig Berger is a landscape sound artist, educator and musician. In his compositions, installations and performances, he enables intimate and playful sonic encounters with plants, animals, buildings and geological entities. In his musical work, Berger produces sonic eco-fictions with processed and synthetic sounds. He has composed sound and music for award-winning films and theatre pieces and curated the landscape sound festival 'Sonic Topologies' in Zurich. He is also founder and curator of the label Vertical Music, which releases field recordings and experimental music.

Berger holds degrees in electroacoustic composition, as well as musicology, art history and literature. As a sound researcher and teacher at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich from 2015-2022, he studied the sonic dimension of Japanese gardens, alpine glaciers and urban landscapes, which among other things led to the release of the acclaimed album trilogy 'Melting Landscapes', 'Dammed Landscapes' and 'Buried Landscapes'.