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 microphone, when to press record, what to do with the sound afterwards… these are always conscious choices, and in Mexico City, where certain places carry real political complexity, they are sometimes consequential ones. For Flow, he worked on Segment 23 of the River Lech, the stretch just beyond Augsburg where the river is split in two: on one side a canal running through a former hydropower station, now a museum; on the other, a channel that is still constrained but visibly alive, moving, breathing, trying to find its own course. The field recording was taken on the more natural half, where a family was playing on the gravel and a child was throwing pebbles into the water, shrieking with excitement. That child made it into the final composition. Cuando el cauce recuerda (When the Riverbed Remembers) will be presented at the Sonidario in Mexico City, a dedicated listening space at Los Pinos (the former presidential residence) fitted with 46 speakers in fifth-order ambisonics. The piece that began beside a river in Bavaria will be heard in three dimensions, in a room designed for exactly this kind of listening. If you’re enjoying this, consider subscribing. I’ll email you the next episodes Cuando el cauce recuerda (When the riverbed remembers) is a piece created for the Flow project, which focuses on exploring the presence and memories of water in different territories. The work stems from a field recording made on the Lech River, on the outskirts of Augsburg. It is in this stretch of the river where the landscape opens up again: the riverbed reclaims space and its sound expands.The work is situated in a sonic territory that navigates between soundscape and electroacoustic music and suggests, through an everyday moment—a scene of encounter between nature, industrial memory, and community life—that it constitutes the initial material of the composition.The field recording underwent a spectral analysis process that allowed for the separation of different sound components. Each of these layers was subsequently transformed using various sound processing and synthesis techniques, including temporal stretching, filtering, and spectral manipulations. From these operations, new textures, densities, and perspectives of the original material emerged, generating an expanded auditory field.Rather than simply reconstructing the place in a documentary style, the piece seeks to explore its latent resonances. Processed fragments of the river and the sound of voices are transformed into sound currents themselves, revealing invisible or inaudible layers of the environment.In this sense, water appears as a form of song that is heard again after having been silenced. When the river returns, it is thus an invitation to listen attentively, to resonate with the flow of the landscape, and to recover, through play and sonic imagination, our sensitive relationship with rivers. - Jorge Martínez Valderrama 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
