Dmytro, known in the ambient and experimental music world as Bayun the Cat, lives in Kyiv, where he works on music mostly at night, often with the sounds of the city outside doing their best to intrude. Valentin Doychinov, who records under the name V-stok, is based in Italy, primarily a guitarist who picked up drums a couple of years ago. The two met through an international ambient and experimental music community Dmytro has spent years helping organise, and for Flow, they came together on Segment 4 of the River Lech, weaving Baroque instrumental music into free improvisation, piano and organ parts that seem to live their own lives alongside Valentin’s drums, caught somewhere between logic and impulse.

Given they’re based in two different countries, the interview itself came together in an unusual way: through voice messages, exchanged back and forth on a group chat.

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).

A month ago I shared the first half of Flow: vol.1 - Left Bank. Today the river is complete.

Flow Compilation - vol.2 - Right Bank is out now on Bandcamp.

Right Bank collects the other 25 pieces, following the Lech once more from its source in the Austrian Alps to its confluence with the Danube, this time along a hypothetical right bank. Same river, same twenty-five segments, a different artist at every bend, and almost three hours of music in total.

Listening to it again, I keep noticing how far the river travels with them. A factory siren rebuilt at its exact frequency, then broken into staccato rhythms. A woman in Austria who kept a bridge outside her window for two months and found a song in it. Baroque piano and organ improvising with the current. A recorder’s battery cover lost in the water on a snowy January walk. A violin workshop in Füssen, opened by violin maker Gabriel Reinhold, whose wood and conversations became percussion. A hydroelectric hum that turned out to hold a D-flat major triad. Church bells run through tape. Seventeen minutes beside a weir. Hippos, baboons and distant Maasai voices gathering around a river in a very different part of the world. And, on the Right Bank too, a track from my own band, Some Kind of Menace.

Between them they say what I’ve learned this year: the river does not have one voice, and none of these twenty-five answers sound alike.

If you want to know the stories behind the music, you can listen to the podcast interviews here.

These are the artists on the second compilation:

* Bill McKenna - Lech Waltz

* Andy Billington - The River Reflects Our Lives

* Michelle Breslin - Hope Carries Us

* Bayun the Cat feat. Valentin Doychinov - Lech Bop

* Sara Hubrich - Bird of Belief

* Daina Dieva - Rupuma - D

* Francesco Ganassin - Figures

* Giuseppe Cordaro - Braided Memory (Lech)

* Tim Wojcik - Until the Fall

* Heather Spence - Out of the Woods

* Masako Yokouchi - Submerged

* Louis Möckel - Entrophony

* Angela Tisner - David’s Promenade

* Julian Goldberger - Idylle am Stausee

* Nick Kuepfer - Gravel from a Field to Water Through a Town

* Gretchen Jude - Sink, Surface

* EMERGE - Weir

* Paco Maddalena - Echo Under Concrete

* Anja Kreysing - Segment 19 - FLUME

* Karhide & Deep Dive Sound - Low-Fi River Flow

* VagueWanderer - Lech

* KLONK - Cross Flow

* Some Kind of Menace - Wasserkraftwerk

* Simon Holmes with the Portobello Drone Choir - The Quiet Goodbye

* Nicolo Scolieri - Nonatonic Analogy, Danube Confluence

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).

Nicolo Scolieri is a sound artist, flautist, and accordionist based in Seattle, Washington. His practice spans sound art, meditation music, field recording, and an ongoing fascination with music theory — particularly the exploration of non-standard scales and what happens when you push harmony beyond its conventional boundaries. He has contributed to Cities & Memory projects for several years, including the Well-Being Cities project presented at the C40 Summit in Buenos Aires, and the Polar Sounds project with the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity.

For Flow, he worked on Segment 25 of the River Lech — the final point, where the Lech meets the Danube near Marxheim. A moment of ending that is also, immediately, a continuation: the Lech water doesn’t disappear, it simply changes name. That ambiguity — where does one river end and another begin, and does the name matter? — became the philosophical and compositional heart of his piece.

He recorded nine different instruments, each playing a distinct melody that converges on the same final pitch. Nine tributaries, one confluence.

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).