Mike Dawes and Charles Berthoud release Belle Insomnie for acoustic guitar and fretless bass
The new recording pairs Dawes’ acoustic guitar with Berthoud’s fretless bass on a five-minute instrumental collaboration.
Sep 7, 2026
Credit: Mike Dawes (via source)
Mike Dawes and Charles Berthoud released Belle Insomnie on September 4 through Dawes’ official Bandcamp. The recording puts Dawes on acoustic guitar and Berthoud on fretless bass, creating a compact instrumental meeting between two players known for stretching the technical vocabulary of their instruments.
The release page also includes a solo 2026 master of Belle Insomnie, making the collaboration especially useful as a direct comparison: the same composition can be heard both as Dawes’ solo-guitar piece and as an expanded guitar-and-bass arrangement. It is a small release in scale, but a very guitar-specific one that a mainstream headline sweep could easily miss.
Why it matters
It is a direct collaboration between two high-level modern instrumentalists, and the paired solo/collaboration versions expose how the arrangement changes when fretless bass enters the picture.
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