Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast

Dmytro, known in the ambient and experimental music world as Bayun the Cat, lives in Kyiv, where he works on music mostly at night, often with the sounds of the city outside doing their best to intrude. Valentin Doychinov, who records under the name V-stok, is based in Italy, primarily a guitarist who picked up drums a couple of years ago. The two met through an international ambient and experimen...

A month ago I shared the first half of Flow: vol.1 - Left Bank . Today the river is complete. Flow Compilation - vol.2 - Right Bank is out now on Bandcamp. Right Bank collects the other 25 pieces, following the Lech once more from its source in the Austrian Alps to its confluence with the Danube, this time along a hypothetical right bank. Same river, same twenty-five segments, a different artist a...

Nicolo Scolieri is a sound artist, flautist, and accordionist based in Seattle, Washington. His practice spans sound art, meditation music, field recording, and an ongoing fascination with music theory — particularly the exploration of non-standard scales and what happens when you push harmony beyond its conventional boundaries. He has contributed to Cities & Memory projects for several years, inc...

Stephanie Vasko is a sound and performance artist based in Lansing, Michigan, originally from New Jersey. Her work explores the connection between nature and humanity, often through field recording, virtual modular synthesis, and moments built for audience participation. She’s a longtime collaborator with Cities & Memory, and when Flow’s call came through, what drew her in was the project’s struct...

In today’s episode we’ll listen to Anna Vienna Ho’s composition. For Flow, she worked on Segment 21 of the River Lech — the Stadtwald Augsburg, a vast urban forest south of the city, where calm canal waters wind through parkland and families spend their Sunday afternoons. A landscape that is at once carefully managed and quietly alive. We’ve reached out to her, asking more about the philosophy and...

Have you ever wondered what a wildfire pattern sounds like? Or have you ever wished for an ambient drone to accompany a text you wrote? Good news, now you have some intuitive, interactive online tools to do exactly that. Tim Waterfield is the man behind the Karhide project who, together with Rafael Diogo’s Deep Dive Sound, created Lo-fi River Flow for our project. On top of making music he’s alway...

Giuseppe Cordaro is a sound sculptor and field recordist based in Reggio Emilia, Italy. His practice sits between attentive documentary listening and abstraction — drawn to places where sound behaves like matter, where a landscape can be heard as a living score, and where a recording becomes not an illustration of a site but its afterimage. Giuseppe treated the field recording as his entire palett...

Heather Spence is a marine biologist, musician, and composer based in Washington, DC, who spends much of her research life recording and interpreting underwater soundscapes, work with dolphins and coral reefs among it. Her music draws directly from that world, built around natural sound and what she describes as a celebration of listening to the natural world and finding our place in it. For Flow,...

TYΦA are Laura Jean Cameron and Matt Rogalsky, a duo based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Laura Jean is a sonic geographer and professor at Queen’s University; Matt is a composer and sound artist who leads the Sonic Arts Studio at the same institution. Their practice begins with cattails — the marsh plant whose scientific name, Typha , gives the duo its name — hand-woven into cordage strings that a...

Paweł is a musician and sound artist based in Southampton, UK, who records and performs under the name Canis Arboris. His practice moves between electro-acoustic composition, field recording, and a quiet attentiveness to the way places, objects, and time leave traces in sound. For Flow, he worked on Segment 11 of the River Lech — the stretch passing through Füssen, where the river crosses from Aus...

In this episode we’re talking with Daina Dieva, an artist and anthropologist working between sound, video, performance, and ethnographic fieldwork. Her PhD research, conducted at the University of Tartu, took her to the Roya Valley, on the French-Italian border, in the aftermath of Storm Alex, the storm that tore through the region in 2020. She arrived the following summer, when the debris had mos...

Michael Northam is an American sound artist based in Chino Valley, Arizona, who has been exploring sound-as-art across more than 30 countries for the past 30 years. He describes his practice as “composting sounds” — re-framing surroundings through a combination of natural sound phenomena, synthesis, and found objects to create location-based work that slows down time and listens deeper to what he...

Rocío Colonizt is a sound designer and field recordist based in General Roca, in the province of Río Negro, Argentina. She holds a degree in Sound Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Audiovisual Arts, and works primarily in sound design for film, video art, and video games — alongside a practice in field recording and soundscape composition. She grew up ten kilometres from the Río Negro, the river tha...

Jorge Martínez Valderrama is a Mexican composer and sound artist based in Mexico City. His background is in classical composition, string quartets, chamber ensembles, the discipline of writing for live instruments, but he has moved steadily toward acousmatic work, where fixed media and field recording become the primary material. For Jorge, a recording is never a neutral act. Where to point a micr...

Nick Kuepfer is a musician, field recordist, and sound designer based in Montreal, Canada. His practice moves between nylon string and electric guitar, live-sampled tape loops, field recordings, and analog processing — a methodical, vigilant experimentalism guided by the search for consonance and dissonance with the sounds of the natural world. He has recorded the intimate sounds of Alaska’s perma...

Lisa Rae Bartolomei is a composer and sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work explores the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound, often using transformation as both method and metaphor — taking a source material and pulling it so far from its origins that something entirely new emerges in its place. For Flow, she worked on Segment 6 of the River Lech — the hanging bridge at...

Karhide and Deep Dive Sound collaborated on Segment 20 of the River Lech, near Königsbrunn — a channelised stretch dammed for hydropower, heavily modified, and without restoration plans. The same paradox that struck Elissa Goodrich in the same segment: a landscape shaped entirely by human intervention that has nonetheless become a refuge for nature. But where most artists stayed close to the River...

Tim Wojcik is a media and sound artist based in Weimar, Germany. His practice moves between electroacoustic composition, field recording, and a form of deep listening that he describes as meditative — a way of being present with a landscape rather than simply documenting it. For Flow, he worked on Segment 10 of the River Lech — the Lech Falls, near Füssen, where the river passes through a gorge th...

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, thou...

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 conne...

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 stru...

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 landscape...

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 good...

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 conti...

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...