Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast

50 international artists. One river. Urgent questions.

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Flowcast is the podcast companion to Flow, an art & science project where 50 international musicians compose original pieces inspired by the ecology, history, and restoration of the river Lech. Each episode, we chat with one of the artists about their creative process — then we listen. artmusicscience.substack.com

3d ago

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

18 min
May 26

Louis Möckel - Entrophony

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

18 min
May 21

Elissa Goodrich - The River Remembers

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 Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

18 min
May 15

Eulipion Corps - Idylle am Stausee

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

7 min
Apr 28

Anja Kreysing - Segment 19 - FLUME

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 production have left the river, in the scientists’ words, “widely lacking natural geomorphic dynamics.” There are no restoration plans for this segment. Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

21 min
Apr 24

Salma Ahmad Caller - Have You Ever Seen A Swan

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

29 min
Apr 21

Sergio Marchesini - Washing Away Our Ragged Lives

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

21 min
Apr 17

Francesco Ganassin - Figures

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 transitions — and transition is very much Francesco’s territory. Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

20 min

Flowcast is the podcast companion to Flow, an art & science project where 50 international musicians compose original pieces inspired by the ecology, history, and restoration of the river Lech. Each episode, we chat with one of the artists about their creative process — then we listen. artmusicscience.substack.com

Creator

50 international artists. One river. Urgent questions.
Years Active

2K
Episodes

22
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Riccardo
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Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast