Steppes, deserts and arid mountains dominate the region of Cuyo in west Argentina. Within this barren land, a fragile water infrastructure creates fertile valleys, croplands and vineyards. The piece moves between these extremes of dry and wet. The wind, as well as the the hands of the recordist articulate the silent elements of the landscape. Except gentle equalization, all composed sounds are unprocessed.

Released at Sonospace, 2019.

Awarded with the 1st prize of the 14th Electroacoustic Composition Competition Música Viva (Miso Music Portugal). Recording Locations: Barreal, Parque Nacional El Leoncito, Uspallata, Valle Fértil. Composed in the Studio for Electro-Acoustic Music (SeaM) Weimar. Thanks to Robin Minard. Image Credit: U.S. Geological Survey. Department of the Interior/USGS.

Cuyo (Sonospace, 2013/2019)

Augmented field recording from the sonically perfumed entrance area of a balinese themed love hotel in the amusement district of Shinjuku, Tokyo. Steamy fountains and pseudo balinesean muzak in between artificial rock walls, further infused with fake(?) amphibians and slowed down aquatic garden ornaments.
Released as part of the compilation "possible moisture", forms of minutiae 2021 -> https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/possible-moistures

🌺🌴🏵 Hotel Bali-An Resort Shinjuku Island Tokyo - Adult Only $63 ($̶2̶6̶5̶)💦🏨🌸

We animals not only live in different spatial scales, but also in different temporal scales. The smaller a creature and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower it perceives light, movement and sound. The installation takes the habitat of a meadow as a starting point to let us shift from human to other perceptions of time.

The playback speed of different animal recordings is globally slowed down, continuously from 100% to 10% and accelerated again to 100%. The signals of the animals repeat continuously and always remain in the same position in space. Due to the varying speed, new frequencies and details of the signals become audible. The cycle lasts 30 minutes (in this excerpt the cycle has been accelerated to 4 minutes). The frequency of the light color is also subtly slowed down and sped up again. The recorded animals are ordinary: birds (gorcrow, blackbird, yellowhammer, great tit), wild bees, grasshoppers, bats, mice, a deer, and a human, as well as a church bell in the distance. The installation offers a psychosonic therapy for "species loneliness"— that "sense of isolation and sadness that comes from human alienation from other species and their extinction" (Robert Macfarlane). The work invites us to experience biodiversity as a multiplicity of being-in-the-world while discovering shared commonalities across species.

The high-resolution field recordings were made on a meadow in my home village of Lobsann (Alsace, France), a meadow in St. Imier (Jura, Switzerland), and isolated archival recordings of other animals from these habitats. The recordings from St. Imier were made during an artist residency at "La Dépendance" in the summer of 2022.

Realized at ZiMMT Leipzig, December 2022

Interspecies Fusion Frequency (accelerated excerpt)

kartierung hypothetischer inseln im maßstab 1:1

keine landschaft, aber eine landkarte.
keine scheinzusammenhänge, aber scheininseln.
keine feldaufnahmen, aber feldforschungen.
 
material: ein sample aus einer als sound ausgelesenen bild-datei (danke an philipp drieger: http://www.noumentalia.de/art/sound/)

***

mapping of hypothetical islands on the scale of 1:1

not a landscape, but a map of the land.
no phantom connections, but phantom islands.
no field recordings, but fieldwork.

material: a sample from a picture file played as sound (thanks to philipp drieger: http://www.noumentalia.de/art/sound/)

2014

mapping of hypothetical islands on the scale of 1:1

In a laboratory-like experimental setup, I investigated the sounds of melting ice. I let a large block of ice melt in an aquarium filled with warm water. The air bubbles escaping from the ice created impulses that form tones and melodies. I recorded these sounds, strongly reminiscent of human voices, with underwater microphones and superimposed them at different speeds.

The work was commissioned by Kunsthaus Langenthal (Switzerland) for the exhibition "Your Voice, Keep Breathing", 3.9.-19.11.2023
Curation: Eva-Maria Knüsel
Scenography: Annatina Huwyler

cryo-cry (excerpt)

Binaural audio installation on care workers at Munich Kammerspiele
With Florian Fischer, 2021
Original piece developed at Schauspielhaus Bochum, 2019

Unsichtbar (Excerpt)

An improvised field recording set on aquatic life and death in the age of the Anthropocene. It combines underwater recordings of singing glaciers, pulsating aquatic plants and water insects with spatial resonances from hydropower dams and reservoirs.

Live on the river Bille, Floating Transmission, Hamburg 2023
Festival curated by Julia Nordholz
Photo by Antje Sauer

Troubled Waters (Field Recording Live Set @ Floating Transmissions 2023)

These insect substrate-borne vibrations were recorded with laser doppler vibrometers from local plants in a wet meadow located in Gais, Switzerland. Laser vibrometers are able to detect the vibrational signals emitted by insects that travel through the surface of the plants in the meadow. Only two local insects could be identified by the signals they produced, and those were Aphropora major (a froghopper) and Sorhoanus assimilis (a leafhopper). Over 20 different insect signals were documented during the field study. Although their identity can not be revealed yet, we hypothesise that many of these signals belong to the Auchenorryncha suborder of insects, specialised in vibrational communication. The signals, emanating from the vibrational interactions within the local vibroscape, were extracted from 150 hours of recorded material collected over the course of August 8, 9, and 10, 2023. The research of vibroscapes in nature is rather recent and this was the first time that an alpine meadow was recorded.

In collaboration with @tremoneta (Juan José López Díez, National Institute of Biology, Slovenia)

All recordings made on site by Juan José López Díez 
Editing and composition by Ludwig Berger
Installation by Ludwig Berger and Juan José López Díez
Photo by Juan José López Díez
Realized at the Festival KLANG MOOR SCHOPFE, Gais, Switzerland 2023

Ludwig Berger & Juan José López Díez - Vibroscape Of Hochmoor Gais (Excerpt)

Singing Sicilian work songs in an abandoned quarry under Mount Etna with Matilde Ponti and Architecture students of ETH Zurich.

Cava di Nicolosi, 2022.

Cava di Nicolosi, Etna

This sonic exploration delved into the natural and vernacular stone architecture of Corsica, highlighting its profound relationship with landscape sound. The initiative comprised a series of on-site acoustic experiments, soundwalks, and polyphonic singing workshops with locals, aimed at uncovering the perceptual and cultural dimensions of acoustics both indoors and outdoors. As participants traversed the island, they engaged in listening exercises to discern how different rock types, from granite to limestone, influence our auditory perception. These activities also included sound recording and experimental playback with speakers on-site, comparisons of church acoustics, and presentations of traditional Corsican landscape instruments. Through this circumnavigation, the exploration sought to understand how sound and resonance define social spaces within the diverse landscapes of Corsica, emphasizing the intricate relationship between human culture and geological formations.

With J.J. Andreani (instruments) and Christian Andreani (singer)

Patrimonio, outside (Christian Andreani)

Coti Chiavari, inside (J.J Andreani)

Coti Chiavari, outside (J.J Andreani)

Field recording from Morteratsch Glacier (Swiss Alps) in June 2016. Recorded with JrF hydrophones in various entry points (ponds, crevasses, melted into the ice) and layered together with gentle filtering. Additional recordings by Seonju Kim.

Inside Morteratsch Glacier

The smooth surface of a ice puddle breaking, sinking and disappearing in the mud below. The sounds could only be made once. Recorded on a very early winter morning in the woods near Weimar (Germany).

Selected for Kinokophonography @ British Library, 2015.

ice puddle (winter morning, weimar 2013)

Remix of a Balinese Gamelan piece (Terambil dari Gong Pangkoeng, Beka_1934) from the archives of Musée Guimet, Paris. Comissioned by Tsuku Boshi for the Guimet Nocturne, 2018.

Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

we go candied in the marrow

Entangled sonorities in the smallest human scale, where the vital materiality of things disturb stable relationships between cause and effect. 

Prepared Harp: Veronika Ehrensperger
Cardioid mic, double tracker and equalizer: Ludwig Berger
No effects or further manipulations.

Cassette, Dinzu Artefacts 2018
https://www.dinzuartefacts.com/dnz33

The Capacity of Things to Act

Ontologically One, Formally Diverse (Dinzu Artefacts, 2018)

Nonorganic Life I (Mic, Plastic, String)

Steady motions between the Mediterranean Sea, Asian peripheries and Northern European expanses. Blurred traces of extraction, collection and distribution; entangled bodies; translocality; placelessness and non-time. In between the infrastructure: voices from an uncertain past; the possibility of a dead-end street; touching and releasing the ground. 

Recommended way of listening: half asleep / in transit. 

Field recordings, Roland Juno 6. 
Recorded and composed by Ludwig Berger, 2015-2017
Released at Canti Magnetici (C40 - Canto 16), 2019.

Cargo (Canti Magnetici, 2019) (Side A)

1959 sounds out the relationship between recording and remembering, between the fixed time of the medium and the fluent time of memory. Different scenes and reflections gel in an in a “theatre of the past that is constituted by memory” (Gaston Bachelard).

The composition includes sounds of a harp, a piano, flute, electronics, cassettes, telephones, wind, water, my family, my family home, my hometown and Henry Purcell. The recordings were taken the past six years and the first eight years of my life.

The piece came into being in the second half of 2012 and was composed inbetween moving from my old apartment in Erfurt and my new apartment in Weimar, at my family home in Alsace und the SeaM studio in Weimar.

The work is dedicated to the memory of my mother (born 1959).

1959

Impulsive Habitat, 2014.

The material of this work is based on a static recording: I installed a microphone under the roof of my father's house in a small village in Alsace (France) for one year. Each day, I recorded one minute of sound on the hour at four different intervals: midnight, morning, noon and evening. I subsequently selected one recording per week for each of the intervals.
These (untreated) recordings were then sewn together in four different tracks, one for each time of day, spanning the course of a year. This results in a cyclical movement consisting of four different time-lapse sequences that trace the entirety of a year in one place.

A Year's Hours Behind my Father's House (Excerpt: Midnight, from May to September)

sonic ecologies 
🎐🦑💧👂🕷️🌵🔊

Ludwig Berger

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