Paco Maddalena - Echo Under Concrete. (Moto Vincolato).

Paco Maddalena - Echo Under Concrete. (Moto Vincolato).

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. Read the full interview on Substack Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe [https://artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Amanda Stuart - Spirits of the wild river

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). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe [https://artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Max Greening - Flow: Group chat fragments

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. If you’re enjoying this, consider subscribing. I’ll email you the next episodes Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe [https://artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Suzi Lamb and Nicky Rushton - The Stony One

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). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe [https://artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Gretchen Jude - Sink, Surface

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). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe [https://artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]