Unfathomless Approaches 100 Releases with Tossapol’s Museums and Medery’s Forest Walks

The Brussels label Unfathomless edges closer to its 100th release with two new single-track albums, each a study in listening as a form of remembering. Tossapol’s two museums and Ludovic Medery’s sédiment arrive as the 94th and 95th entries in a catalog that has spent years treating field recording as a precise, documentary art.

Tossapol’s piece comes from a return to a science museum that once felt vast and futuristic. A childhood visit had imprinted a whole sensory terrain: a new planetarium, bright exhibits, the noise of a school trip spilling through wide doors. Decades later, the lighting is dimmer and the displays are no longer fresh. The artist overlays that memory with an “imaginary building,” turning the physical site into something porous. The recording begins with door chimes, morning birds, and traffic. Soon, wind rustles through corridors, a lone visitor fumbles and whistles, a conversation surfaces around the ten-minute mark. Trickling water, tour-guide murmurs, and balloon-like sounds follow, not as documentation of what the museum is but as a rendering of what it felt like and how that feeling has worn against time.

Medery’s sédiment takes a different route, walking through Colonster Woods near Liège with what the artist calls “sound filming.” The opening minutes catch the resonance of a metal drum abandoned by the riverside. Crackle, rustle, and water flow set an initial calm, but the recording doesn’t settle into bucolic ease. Things appear that are hard to identify. An animal cry, maybe. A plane ripping low overhead. Twigs snap. The act of listening starts to feel a little vulnerable, then finds a natural tempo, with percussive pops and high-pitched commentary from an unseen frog or insect. A closing thunderclap returns that edge. The album holds attention not by smoothing the forest into a postcard but by preserving the faint unease that comes with being somewhere alone and listening hard.

Both releases sit comfortably within Unfathomless’s larger project, which has long favored sustained, unadorned works that treat a place as a subject rather than a backdrop. The centennial is in sight. These two albums suggest the label has no interest in celebration for its own sake, just a continued commitment to recordings that let sound carry memory without forcing it into words.