Julian Sartorius climbs to the heights: on his new Hidden Tracks album the drummer follows the path from the Italian town of Domodossola (272 m) to the summit of the Weissmies (4,017 m) in the Valais — a vertical span of 3,745 metres. On this ascent he makes the journey audible, collecting sounds and tones encountered along the way with nothing more than his drumsticks and a portable recorder. In Domodossola, he explains, “I could play on everything with my drumsticks — streetlamps, electrical boxes, traffic signs.” As the trek progresses, the sonic palette changes: the noises of town and village fall away, the landscape grows sterner, and the textures of nature shift from forest undergrowth to rocky deserts and finally to snow and stone at the summit. We hear the route unfold — footsteps through woods, the moment the tree line is reached, the brittle resonance of stone — until the Weissmies itself is attained. This vertical expedition is a continuation of Sartorius’s earlier Hidden Tracks project, in which he traversed the distance between Basel and Geneva, documenting places and encounters with the same low-tech, highly focused approach. Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – Weissmies condenses the trek into a concentrated 35-minute sound journey. Sequenced with rhythmic precision, it animates landscape and human presence alike, offering an uncanny, intimate way of experiencing environment, movement and sound.