* Limited edition of 100. Contains a 16 pages booklet with selected writings by Basalt * In Tracing Basalt in the Onsernone Valley, Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger propose an extended sonic investigation that is at once rigorous, poetic, and gently radical. Released on August 17, 2025, the album documents the results of several fieldwork visits, during which the artists engaged with the valley not as passive recordists, but as creative listeners and co-performers alongside the landscape itself. Environmental sounds—streams tumbling over stone, birdsong mingling with distant weather, the subtle friction of insects, human voices and footsteps—are carefully captured, layered, and shaped through discreet processing and spatial techniques.
Rather than attempting to map the valley in any exhaustive or literal sense, Diserens and Berger attend to the minute, fluctuating atmospheres shaped by local geology and seasonal change. Their compositional approach—mixing extended listening, minimal intervention, and environmentally-evocative electroacoustics—roots the album in the traditions of deep mapping and non-linear music, but never loses sight of its subject’s physical presence. Ruins, watercourses, and villages all find their way into the soundworld, reflecting both the valley’s enduring character and its ongoing transformation by human and natural forces.
Each piece unfolds deliberately and with patience, encouraging immersion rather than analysis. The sound palette—variegated but always organic—supports a complex interplay between clarity and ambiguity, yielding moments of both intimacy and vastness. Released as part of Vertical Music’s and forms of minutiae’s catalogues, the album stands at the confluence of experimental fieldwork and sonic cartography, inviting listeners into a space expressly designed for attentive, relational listening.
Tracing Basalt in the Onsernone Valley thus emerges as both archive and subjective guidebook, a testament to listening as a form of careful inhabitation. Diserens and Berger’s collaboration marks a vital contribution to contemporary sound art and ecological music, raising questions about our relationship to place and the porous boundaries between documentation and invention.
