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.
But Anja found a fish passage. A modest, largely unremarkable structure — a channel carved into concrete, built under a road — designed to recreate, as faithfully as possible, conditions natural enough for fish to navigate past a dam. When she recorded inside it, she found the water produced a very particular resonance: a narrow, unstable microtonal field sitting between the pitches A and B-flat.
That resonance became the starting point for everything.
Segment 19 – FLUME investigates the acoustic behaviour of a regulated river segment through a post-cinematic compositional approach. The piece originates from a field recording made inside the concrete tube of a fish pass, where water striking the walls produces a narrow resonance between A and B♭. This unstable microtonal field becomes the structural centre of the work. Granular and spectral processes, sine tones, and slowly drifting accordion drones performed on two slightly detuned instruments reorganise the recording into an evolving acoustic space. Rather than depicting the site, the composition amplifies its latent resonances, pressure, and spatial constraints.
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).
