Ludwig Berger
Species Loneliness
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 sounds are delicately electro-acoustic, with gentle mysterious and eerie chimes, sounds and songs in which we feel ourselves at the beginning of a personal descent into the underworld. Something is wrong, we can’t quite put our finger on it yet but we hold onto the worst of it as this sound raises the insecurity within us. A wonderful insecurity, a magically induced subtle chill.” (Soda Pop, translated from Italian)

Without a doubt, the EP is masterfully and intriguingly produced. Its unsettling quality lies in the ambiguity of its sound sources — it’s often unclear whether the sounds were generated by computers or synthesizers at all. Rather than contemporary ambient music, it recalls Bebe and Louis Barron’s soundtrack for Forbidden Planet (1956). (Recent Music Heroes, translated from Finnish)

“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