Schlamm (Mud) is a volume of the Edition Musikfabrik about nature and humanity's place in it, starting from the primeval mud where life begins and ends. Four works by four composers look at moraine landscapes, sewage sludge, an ocean without beginning or end and a creature who eats his way out of his own grave. All four appear here in their first recordings.

The Cologne Ensemble Musikfabrik plays under four conductors: Emilio Pomàrico, Jean Deroyer, Enno Poppe and Marcus Creed. In the opening work it is joined by the vocal ensemble EXAUDI, and in the last the ensemble's horn player Christine Chapman is the soloist on Wagner tuba. The recordings are a production of WDR Köln, from an initiative of the Kunststiftung NRW and the ensemble. The cover reproduces an Abstraktes Bild (1999) by Gerhard Richter, who has sat on the ensemble's board of trustees since 2009.

Brian Ferneyhough, born in Coventry in 1943 and generally seen as the central figure of the New Complexity, took the inhospitable moraine landscape of Cornwall as the starting point of Finis Terrae (2012) for six voices and an ensemble of 18. Klaus Lang, the Austrian composer and organist born in Graz in 1971, describes The Ocean of Yes and No (2008) as a story with no beginning or end, no climax and no apotheosis. Carola Bauckholt wrote Schlammflocke (2010) for Musikfabrik: the title names the sludge flocks of microorganisms that break down sewage in treatment plants, and the piece draws on a whole bestiary of sounds. Jorge E. López's Gonzales the Earth Eater (1996) is scored for Wagner tuba, English horn, bass clarinet, viola and cello. It refers to William S. Burroughs and his creature Gonzales, who defies his own funeral.

Three of the works were written in the ensemble's orbit. The Ocean of Yes and No was commissioned by the Kunststiftung NRW and Musikfabrik, and Schlammflocke was premiered by Musikfabrik under Poppe at the WDR in Cologne on 24 October 2010. Finis Terrae was commissioned by Musikfabrik, the Kunststiftung NRW, the Festival d'Automne and Casa da Música, and was given in Paris in November 2012. López, born in Havana in 1955 and raised in the United States, has written a series of works for the Wagner tuba; Gonzales was premiered in Stuttgart in 1997.

CD in digipak, Wergo WER 6864 2, released in 2016 in the Edition Musikfabrik (66'50").