SPECIES LONELINESS (digital EP, -OUS, 2024)
Eco-horror and eco-gothic film samples, field recordings
«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.»
«Species Loneliness» 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.
"The sense of a haunting runs through the 6-track EP, and not just in the samples and field recordings that Berger draws on as his source material. Instead a feeling of alienation and nostalgia is shot through tracks like ‘Sea Of Decay’, ‘Apparent Heart’ and ‘Cocoon Death’, which seem to evoke both the toxicity of polluted landscapes and a kind of apathetic indifference which has defined the world’s inability to take any meaningful action. A dark and unsettling vision of a feeling approximated as “homesickness at home”." (Anton Spice, Through Sounds)
Written and produced by Ludwig Berger
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Album cover by Paulin Rogues
Release at -OUS, March 2024