Steffi Baron-Neuhuber is a musician and sound artist based in Pöchlarn, Austria. Her practice moves between improvisation, electronic music, and a deep attentiveness to the sonic qualities of place — listening not just to what a landscape sounds like, but to what it might be trying to say.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 17 of the River Lech, near Pitzling — the same stretch as Gretchen Jude, though the two arrived at entirely different places. Where Gretchen heard a D-flat major triad and imagined water spirits entranced by a machine, Steffi heard something more restless: a river with a story it hadn’t finished telling. Heavily modified, lacking natural dynamics, no restoration plans in sight. And yet, as Steffi put it, the electricity plants won’t be there forever. The river will.

That sense of geological patience — the river outlasting everything built around it — shaped both the title and the emotional register of her composition. lechlechtz is a wordplay on the German verb lechzen, to yearn. A yearning for what the river once was, held alongside a quiet certainty about what it will become again.

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).

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