Michael Northam is an American sound artist based in Chino Valley, Arizona, who has been exploring sound-as-art across more than 30 countries for the past 30 years. He describes his practice as “composting sounds” — re-framing surroundings through a combination of natural sound phenomena, synthesis, and found objects to create location-based work that slows down time and listens deeper to what he calls the mysterious otherness lurking under our collective noses. His website is Orogenetics, a word that combines orogeny, the geological process of mountain formation, with genetics: the study of how things inherit what came before them.

For Flow, he worked on Segment 10 of the River Lech — the Lech Falls near Füssen, where the river passes through a gorge on the border between Austria and Germany. What he received was a field recording that contained almost nothing he expected. No water. Only footsteps, handling noise, distant vehicles, a fragment of a human voice. A recording so shaped by human presence that the river itself had disappeared from it entirely.

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).