Ludwig Berger unveils LP ‘Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than the In-Between’ on -OUS
Ludwig Berger
Landscape sound artist Ludwig Berger will release his new 5-track LP “Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than the In-Between” on 28 November 2025 via the Swiss label -OUS. The album builds on his large-scale sound piece created as the central installation for Luxembourgâs contribution to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where it formed the core of the pavilion exhibition “Sonic Investigations”.
“Ecotonalities” weaves together field recordings from 15 locations across Luxembourg, including an artificial lake, a floating solar plant, a hydroelectric dam, a wind farm, a satellite park, a nature reserve and several data centres.
Berger conceptually explains the work around the ecological concept of the ecotone â a transition zone between two ecosystems â to focus on sonic frictions and co-existence between built infrastructures and more-than-human life. “I like to think of my microphones as musical instruments that are âplayedâ by the beings, elements, and objects in an environment,” Ludwig Berger says.
To realise the piece, Ludwig Berger deployed what he calls an “orchestra of microphones”. A vibrational section captures resonances inside materials and structures, including vibrational communication among animals; an airborne section records sounds traveling through the air; and an electromagnetic section listens to fields generated by infrastructures and natural phenomena. In the studio, he reconstructed these sessions into a multichannel composition, mixing the recordings “like a conductor shaping an orchestra” to balance anthropogenic sounds with biophonic textures from animals and plants.
Berger describes his process as extended on-site work: “For me, field recording is a slow dialogue: the place offers its voices and the site answers with new sounds.”
“Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than the In-Between” will be released as a digital album and a limited edition vinyl LP. The vinyl edition is limited to 300 copies and includes a printed inner sleeve with an index of recording sites and microphones used, plus a download code.
The advance track “Between Water and Circuitry” is already available for streaming.
About Ludwig Berger
Ludwig Berger is a landscape sound artist, musician and educator whose work focuses on the sonic and vibratory dimensions of landscapes. His projects explore how places and species become audible, often through processes that sit at the edge of human perception, such as insect communication, plant rhythms and glacial movement.
Berger studied electroacoustic composition, musicology, art history and literary studies. From 2015 to 2022 he worked as a sound researcher and teacher at the Institute of Landscape Architecture (later Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies) at ETH Zurich, where he combined field recording, scientific collaboration and experimental listening in research on Japanese gardens, alpine glaciers and urban soundscapes. This research produced the multi-year “Bodies of Water” project, a trilogy of LPs â “Melting Landscapes” (2018), “Dammed Landscapes” (2022) and “Buried Landscapes” (2022) â later collected in a three-LP box set.
His recorded work extends back at least to 2014âs “A Yearâs Hours Behind my Fatherâs House” (Impulsive Habitat), followed by releases across labels such as Dinzu Artefact, Vertical Music, Canti Magnetici, Gruenrekorder and forms of minutiae. These include cassette and digital albums like “The Capacity of Things to Act”, “Cargo”, “Inumaki, Esuzaki (Tree Music)” and later projects such as “Photosynthetic beats”.
More recent releases position him within contemporary sound-art and field-recording circles: the “Bodies of Water” box set in 2022, “Garden of Ediacara” on -OUS in 2024, and 2025 works such as “Crying Glacier” on forms of minutiae and “tracing basalt in the onsernone valley” with Pablo Diserens.
Berger grew up in the Northern VosgesâPalatinate Forest Biosphere Reserve and is currently based there.
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