Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast

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...

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. Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Art Music Scienc...

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 Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

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...

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 con...

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....

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 tran...

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...

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 g...

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, an...

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...

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 coll...

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 str...

Today we meet Judith Mann, a musician from near Hamburg, Germany. She worked on the section 12 of the river Lech, which corresponds to the Forggensee, the largest reservoir on the river. When we did our research before our trip along the river we read about some controversies about tourism and noise. We got there in the lowest season and found a calm, almost eerie atmosphere which Judith brilliant...

In this episode we meet Sascha Stadlmeier, a composer, musician, and label owner, from Augsburg, Germany, a city that happens to sit along the river Lech. For our project he worked on the segment of the river running through Landsberg. The recording captures the sounds of the historical centre, taken on a Sunday afternoon while sitting at a café. Then the bells of the church nearby started ringing...

Today we chat with Andy Billington, an artist from Leicestershire in the Midlands, UK, who worked on Segment 2 of the river Lech. Andy talks to us about his creative process, which not only produced the composition we’re going to hear in this episode, but also informed his ‘Damaged Polaroids’ project — an investigation into chemical manipulation that resulted in images reminiscent of aerial and sa...

Our guest for this episode is Bill McKenna, a musician who splits his time between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland. He chose to work on the first segment of the river, its source, where the fresh water flow between the Alps of the Voralberg and Tyrol regions. The material provided by us included photos of the idyllic area, a time-lapse video made with satellite images, and the field recordin...

In this episode we’re going to listen to the work of Aurélien Laville, aka 53cm, a musician from Le Havre, France. He chose to work on segment 18, corresponding to the city of Landsberg. We took the field recording in the city centre while sitting at a café. The water is nearby but can’t be heard, covered by the chit-chat and the clanking of the lively city centre, and by the sound of church bells...

In today’s episode we’re having a chat with Paul Beaudoin on how he approached his work on the first segment of the river. This part of the river Lech is as close as possible to the idea of an alpine paradise: ice-cold waters running through bright green meadows and dark pines, and people wearing dirndl and lederhosen walking through the quiet, sleepy towns. But the silence was deceptive. October,...