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.

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.

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.

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, 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).

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.

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).

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 brilliantly interpreted.

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. Little did I know they were going to sound for almost ten minutes, getting increasingly louder.

Here’s how Sascha described his approach for us, to hear more and listen to his work, check out the podcast episode!

I have been to Landsberg several times and am referring here to the place in the old town next to the weir. The piece represents the surroundings at this location with the constant sound of the river and people sitting in cafés and walking around, and imagines that you are in the river itself, drifting along.I only used the field recordings in different pitches, slowed down and sped up, like some parts of the original recordings. I made further edits and built up layers of the different sounds, creating a mixture of natural and alien sounds that interact with each other. The presence of the river and the weir dominates, or at least accompanies, life in this particular environment and influences people's perceptions both consciously and unconsciously.

Flow is a project by Martina Cecchetto, curated by Riccardo Fumagalli, with the scientific contribution of Florian Betz.

In collaboration with Cities & Memory, University of Padua (Italy), University of Würzburg (Germany).