Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast

Salma Ahmad Caller - Have You Ever Seen A Swan

29 min · 24. huhti 2026
jakson Salma Ahmad Caller - Have You Ever Seen A Swan kansikuva

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

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23 jaksot

jakson Suzi Lamb and Nicky Rushton - The Stony One kansikuva

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]

10. kesä 202616 min
jakson Gretchen Jude - Sink, Surface kansikuva

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]

3. kesä 202618 min