Cara Kelly is a composer and sound artist from Galway, Ireland. Her practice lives at what she calls the threshold — of sound, language, technology, folklore, myth, and poetry — and her approach to composition is rooted in research, respect for the source material, and a sensitivity to the hidden connections between things.

When she encountered the River Lech, she noticed a linguistic thread connecting her native Irish to the river’s name. The Irish word leac — a large flat stone, traditionally placed at the entrance to a home — shares an ancient Celtic root with Lech, itself meaning the stony one. Two languages, centuries and geography apart, carrying the same memory of stone and water.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 9 of the River Lech — the first free-flowing segment coming from downstream, near Pflach in Austria, where alternating sediment bars meet the industrial noise of a gravel extraction factory processing material dug directly from the riverbed. A place where the river’s geological memory and its present-day exploitation exist side by side.

Her composition is called Segment No. 9.

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).

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

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).