Afleveringen
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Steffi Baron-Neuhuber is a musician and sound artist based in Pöchlarn, Austria. Her practice moves between improvisation, electronic music, and a deep attentiveness to the sonic qualities of place — listening not just to what a landscape sounds like, but to what it might be trying to say.
For Flow, she worked on Segment 17 of the River Lech, near Pitzling — the same stretch as Gretchen Jude, though the two arrived at entirely different places. Where Gretchen heard a D-flat major triad and imagined water spirits entranced by a machine, Steffi heard something more restless: a river with a story it hadn’t finished telling. Heavily modified, lacking natural dynamics, no restoration plans in sight. And yet, as Steffi put it, the electricity plants won’t be there forever. The river will.
That sense of geological patience — the river outlasting everything built around it — shaped both the title and the emotional register of her composition. lechlechtz is a wordplay on the German verb lechzen, to yearn. A yearning for what the river once was, held alongside a quiet certainty about what it will become again.
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Cara Kelly is a composer and sound artist from Galway, Ireland. Her practice lives at what she calls the threshold — of sound, language, technology, folklore, myth, and poetry — and her approach to composition is rooted in research, respect for the source material, and a sensitivity to the hidden connections between things.
When she encountered the River Lech, she noticed a linguistic thread connecting her native Irish to the river’s name. The Irish word leac — a large flat stone, traditionally placed at the entrance to a home — shares an ancient Celtic root with Lech, itself meaning the stony one. Two languages, centuries and geography apart, carrying the same memory of stone and water.
For Flow, she worked on Segment 9 of the River Lech — the first free-flowing segment coming from downstream, near Pflach in Austria, where alternating sediment bars meet the industrial noise of a gravel extraction factory processing material dug directly from the riverbed. A place where the river’s geological memory and its present-day exploitation exist side by side.
Her composition is called Segment No. 9.
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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There is a particular kind of silence that concrete makes around water. Not absence of sound, but a different quality of presence — the echo of walls, the hum of engineered constraint. When Paco Maddalena, an Italian ambient and experimental music producer, first listened to the field recording from Segment 19 of the River Lech, that echo was what he heard first. Not the water itself, but the structure surrounding it.
Segment 19 is a fish passage — a channel carved into concrete under a road, built to simulate conditions natural enough for fish to navigate past a dam. A form of imitation: nature reproduced inside infrastructure, the river redirected and constrained for hydropower production, with no restoration plans and no natural geomorphic dynamics remaining. The water moves peacefully. The echo quietly reveals where you are.
That tension became the emotional and compositional core of Echo Under Concrete. Paco’s reading of this segment is one of endurance rather than loss — the river carrying an intrinsic momentum that no amount of engineering has managed to extinguish. Water, fragmented and redirected, still moves forward. Still carries energy and continuity through imposed boundaries, because that is simply what water does.
The composition begins with the field recording in its original, unprocessed form, giving the listener an immediate and unmediated sense of place. Granular synthesis then gradually fragments the sound into micro-particles, stretching and dispersing it into something more unstable and textural — a sonic metaphor for the latent force suppressed beneath engineered control. Modular synthesisers add pulses and resonances, while tape manipulation introduces friction and physical imperfection. At the end, the sound returns to the original recording: a circular movement from reality to abstraction and back again, the river still present as itself despite everything built around it.
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Amanda Stuart is a composer and sound artist based in Cambridge, UK. Her work moves between contemporary composition, vocal performance, and sonic exploration of landscape — often at the point where the human and the non-human meet.
For Flow, she worked on Segment 5 of the River Lech — one of the most extraordinary stretches of the entire river, and one of the few remaining wild riverine landscapes in the Northern Alps. From above, the river forms characteristic heart-shaped gravel formations, known as the “ears of the upper Lech” or the “string of pearls.” It is the heart of the Naturpark Tiroler Lech, protected under the EU Habitats Directive, home to rare species found almost nowhere else in Central Europe.
Amanda used those heart-shapes as her compositional map. She counted five of them in the satellite imagery and built her piece in five sections, with metallic climaxes at each pinch point — the moments where the river narrows before opening again. But the deeper structure of the piece came from somewhere else entirely: from the Nixe, the shape-shifting female water spirits of Austrian folklore, whose voices float through the composition from beginning to end. Whatever happens to the river, Amanda’s message is clear — the spirits remain.
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Max Greening is an artist and sound designer based in Vancouver, Canada. His practice moves between sound, installation, and conceptual art — often exploring how meaning is constructed, deconstructed, and shaped by context.
For Flow, he worked on Segment 24 of the River Lech — the final stretch before the river merges with the Danube, described in the field recording notes as the Lech’s quiet goodbye. But Max didn’t use the field recording. He didn’t use the satellite imagery. He didn’t research the ecology or the history of the segment.
Instead, he went for an entirely left field approach. He exported all the text messages from the Flow project’s WhatsApp group, assigned an AI voice to each participant, and played the messages back in random order.
The piece is called Flow: Group chat fragments. Stripped of their original sequence, the messages illustrate something the river itself demonstrates: meaning depends on context. What happens upstream determines what can be understood downstream. Remove the order, and the story dissolves.
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Suzi Lamb and Nicky Rushton are musicians and long-standing collaborators based in Berlin and Newcastle. Their work together has always been rooted in a sensitivity to place, to the layered histories that accumulate in landscapes and the sounds that carry them forward.
For Flow, they worked on Segment 22 of the River Lech — the stretch running through the heart of Augsburg, one of the oldest continuously settled cities in Germany. To walk beside the Lech in Augsburg is to walk beside two thousand years of human activity: Roman settlement, medieval water management, the textile industry of the nineteenth century, and today a UNESCO-listed water heritage system of 29 canals that still shapes the city’s daily life.
Suzi visited Augsburg in person, walking several stretches of the river. What she felt wasn’t admiration for the engineering or the history. It was responsibility. The river, she said, needed care and attention. It needed guardianship.
That word — guardianship — became the quiet centre of the piece. Not protest, not lament, but something older and more deliberate: the sense that to live beside a river is to be accountable to it, across whatever timescale you can hold in your imagination.
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Gretchen Jude is a composer and sound artist from Salt Lake City, Utah. We spoke with her while she was in Tokyo, where she was on a fellowship, she has lived and worked in Japan many times over the years.
For Flow, she worked on Segment 17 of the River Lech, near Pitzling, a stretch that the scientists describe plainly: heavily modified, widely lacking natural geomorphic dynamics, not a candidate for restoration. Nothing special or remarkable. A section of river that, in the grand narrative of ecological recovery, barely registers.
But Gretchen listened to the field recording and heard something the data didn’t capture: a drone. A low, persistent hum emanating from the Wasserkraftwerk — the hydropower station — that underlies the rush of water like a hidden ground note. She began to sing along with it, matching her voice to its frequencies, until she found what was there: a D-flat major triad, buried in the industrial hum of a machine converting river into electricity.
That discovery changed everything about the piece. Rather than mourning what the river had lost, Gretchen imagined something stranger and more hopeful — a remystification. What if the goal wasn’t to restore the river to a pre-human state, but to restore our sense of wonder about it in whatever state it is in?
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Louis Möckel is a musician and researcher based in Halle, Germany. His practice sits at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, and acoustic ecology — a discipline that studies ecosystems not through what can be seen, but through what can be heard.
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Elissa Goodrich is a composer, vibraphonist, and sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Trained as a classical percussionist, she has spent years working at the intersection of contemporary music and cross-disciplinary collaboration, including ongoing work with climate scientists and fluid dynamics engineers, turning environmental data into sound and music.
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Julian Goldberger is a musician and artist based in Los Angeles, recording and performing under the name Eulipion Corps.
We reached out to him asking a few questions about the work he did for our Art & Science project, Flow
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Anja Kreysing is a musician and researcher based in Münster, Germany. Her work moves between experimental music, sound art, and acoustic ecology, with a particular interest in how constructed and natural environments shape each other through sound.
For Flow, she worked on Segment 19 of the River Lech — a channelised, heavily regulated stretch near Sheuring, where dams and reservoirs for hydropower production have left the river, in the scientists’ words, “widely lacking natural geomorphic dynamics.” There are no restoration plans for this segment.
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In today’s episode we’re speaking with Salma Ahmad Caller, a UK-based multidisciplinary artist with a strong connection to rivers — the Thames and the Nile.
Salma worked on Segment 15 of the river Lech — a stretch that, on the surface, has all the appearance of a secret, undisturbed place. You can hear the swans flying. A lone man unmooring his boat. And yet, just upstream, turbines roar. That contrast — between the dream of serenity and the reality of a world in crisis — became the heart of her composition.
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Sergio's approach is rooted in his double life as developer and composer. He wrote computer vision code to extract the exact shape of the river from a satellite image, then simulated 300 stone trajectories along the current turning their coordinates into pitches, and those pitches into a long, quietly shifting composition for synthetic strings. The river didn't inspire the music. It generated it.
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In today’s episode we’re going to Rovigo, in the Veneto region of northern Italy, to meet Francesco Ganassin — teacher, musician, and builder of instruments that think for themselves.
Francesco works on Segment 8 of the river Lech, a threshold zone where the mountains begin to yield to the plains, and where part of the river is diverted into a side channel for hydropower. It is a landscape of transitions — and transition is very much Francesco’s territory.
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In today’s episode we’re speaking with Michelle Breslin, a composer, musician, and field recordist based in Toronto, Canada, who goes by the artist name Lostworldsounds.
Michelle worked on Segment 3 of the river Lech, near the village of Stockach in Austria — a stretch that was narrowed over time to serve the communities living alongside it, and has only recently been widened again to restore what the river needed. Michelle heard that story in the water itself.
When she first listened to her field recording, she noticed overtones rising from the river that sounded to her like voices from the distant past. That image became the heart of her composition. She gathered four singers, Adelaide and Madison Santos, Julia Maja, Scotch Camera, and Michelle herself, into a reverberant rooftop room, to recreate those ancient-sounding voices.
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In today’s episode we’re speaking with Simon Holmes, a musician from Edinburgh, Scotland, who — for this occasion — teamed up with the Portobello Drone Choir.
Simon worked on Segment 24, the penultimate stretch of the river Lech before it quietly dissolves into the Danube. When he read that the project notes described this section as “the Lech’s quiet goodbye”, he knew exactly where he wanted to go.
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In today’s episode we’re meeting Rachel Larsen-Jones, a sound artist and wildlife sound recordist from Wales, who worked on Segment 4 of the river Lech.
Segment 4 is one of the most ecologically significant stretches of the river — a place where, between 2016 and 2022, a major rewilding programme called LIFE Lech restored the river’s natural dynamics, shortening groynes, removing constructions, and giving the water back some of its freedom to meander. It is the kind of place that makes you want to hike there.
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In today’s episode we’re having a chat with Warren Anthony, a sound artist and musician based near Vancouver, Canada, who goes by the artist name Bleeptwig.
Warren worked on Segment 25 — the final stretch of the river Lech, where it meets the Danube.
He came to the project expecting to work with sound. He ended up working with sediment, threads, and the relationship between rivers and the cultures that grow alongside them. His composition, Sedimental Threads, pulls together field recordings from the Lech and from his home in coastal BC, weaving them into something that feels both local and universal.
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Warren also took part in the Connected Sounds initiative, a community-led project born spontaneously among the participating artists, who began voluntarily sharing sound bites from their field recordings and compositions for anyone to draw from. Warren used a sound shared by Bill McKenna, who worked on Segment 1: the very source of the river. From the first stretch to the last, the Lech flows through the music too.
Let’s hear it, in his own words:
The inspiration from this piece was firstly at the surface level - flow, time, motion - are all inspiring for musical exploration. As I dug deeper into the material, the concept of rivers as enablers to civilization, to history, added deeper layers to explore - how rivers slowly but inexorably shape ideas, stories, culture and music just the same as they shape land and place.I wanted to bring all of these ideas together into some way, while also literally exploring the sound material from the original recording using elements (like sediment) from prior pieces, to construct an evolving and moving piece that suggests a continuity rather than an ending.I hope those ideas come across as it builds to its conclusion. No spoilers.
Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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In this episode we meet Ilaria Boffa, a poet and sound artist based in Padua, Italy. Her latest bilingual (ENG/ITA) poetry book, Beginning & Other Tragedies/Inizi e Altre Tragedie, is published by Valley Press UK and set between the Euganei Hills and Venice.
For Flow she worked on segment 13, Staumauer Lech, characterised by the presence of a large hydropower station. For her composition she collaborated with the violinist Ida Di Vita (Italy) and with the artist, writer, and educator Elizabeth Gallon Droste (Berlin).
In the episode you can hear her perspective on our relationship between the river and us, followed by her composition. Keep reading to find her accompanying notes.
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In this episode we meet Gerald Fiebig, one half of KLONK, a duo based in Augsburg, Germany. They chose to work on the segment of the river Lech running through their city, whose waters feed a network of canals that has been instrumental to the development of this Bavarian city.
KLONK’s piece is inspired by a remarkable feat of engineering: a system of underground culverts that allows different streams to cross without ever mixing. Their composition mirrors this idea, weaving together contrasting layers of sound — natural and human-made, unprocessed and transformed.
Get your headphones on and enjoy the podcast, with the interesting conversation with Gerald and KLONK’s music. Here’s some extra info about their approach to this contribution:
For centuries, the river Lech has played an integral part in the city of Augsburg’s water management system, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage. In this system, a network of canals carries water from the Lech into the city while a network of streams carries spring water from the forest south of Augsburg into the city for drinking. While the clear spring water is potable, the Lech water, carrying sediments, is more suited to industrial uses (watermills, power generation etc.). In order not to mix the different types of water, the engineers devised a series of culverts or siphons (Düker in German) where underground streams can cross each other without mixing their water. This (and the fact that in the original field recording #22 from the Flow project, the water from the Lech is completely inaudible because masked entirely by human-made sound) inspired the structure of this piece, which is based, both in time and in space, around the contrast of clear vs sedimentary, natural vs cultural: it starts with an unprocessed hydrophone recording we made in one of the local streams – water as the source of all life – , then introduces birdsong as a symbol of a natural landscape (which we also recorded locally near the streams in question), which then gives way to the sound of human labour, such as digging a canal (digging into mud.wav by Stefan21100190 -- License: Creative Commons 0).
This human intervention opens the main part of the piece, a long cross-fade of our untreated (‚clear‘) and musically processed (‚sedimentary‘) hydrophone recordings. As these two flows of sound cross each other, they sonically represent the working of a Düker. In the final part of the piece, the gong-like sound of the processed recording fades into the very distinctly human-made sound of church bells. (Being based in Augsburg, we identified the recording location of field recording #22, near one of the canals which enter the city from the forest to its south, thanks to the characteristic sound of the bells of the church of St Ulrich and St Afra. For the long cross-fade from the Düker sounds to the church bells, we made our own recording of the church bells). As our sonic narrative follows the canals and streams through the southern forest northward into the city, the journey of the piece parallels that of the river Lech. The very last segment of the piece (church bells, voices, traffic) consists of the original Flow field recording #22 minus a few seconds at the end, but otherwise unedited. It ends with the sound of a car engine starting, which can be seen as a shorthand reference to human intervention in nature, which is also a central concern regarding the river Lech.
Flow is a project by Dr. Martina Cecchetto, curated by Riccardo Fumagalli, with the scientific contribution of Dr. Florian Betz.
In collaboration with Cities & Memory, University of Padua (Italy), University of Würzburg (Germany).
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