{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"Litzau loops","description":"\"Viewed from above, on maps and in satellite imagery, Litzauer Schleife (‘Litzau Loop’) appears as a gracefully looping meander. Sonically, on the ground, the field recording makes a similar gesture with the sounds of gently flowing water and the calls and wingbeats of birds. We were intrigued to learn this section of the River Lech is protected by conservation legislation and is one of the very few remaining parts of the river that approximates a ‘natural’ riverscape. We dug a bit into the history of this place and learned about past times and people that both inspired and troubled our contribution.\n\n\"In the decades following World War Two, Litzau Loop was saved from being turned into a reservoir while under incredible pressure from powerful industrial interests seeking to develop entirely the Bavarian section of the River Lech. The word ‘pressure’ and sound of water rushing through a power plant in Ilaria Boffa’s preceding piece for Section 13 thus resonated for us and we brought it into the our opening.\n\n\"Another thread of continuity we introduce is historical. Today the person celebrated for protecting the Litzau Loop from destruction is Professor Dr. Otto Kraus (1905-1984). A famous line associated with him, from a film Natur in Gefahr (Nature in Danger) that he co-produced in 1952, is: \"He who destroys nature, destroys himself\". While being a stalwart force for nature conservation in post-war Germany, Kraus’s role was continuous in many ways with the work he did for the Nazi Regime but using then the language of primeval nature as essential cultural identity for preservation of the German volk: one argument for regional wetland conservation was the expectation of additional lebensraum to be provided for development by Hitler’s expansionism. As fascism rises again in the loops and returns of history, we have chosen to embed rather ignore unsettling links between nature and nationalist identity politics.\n\n\"Despite its protected status, we learned too that the Litzau Loop is still in danger of disappearing. The lack of hydrologic dynamics in the highly industrialized River Lech means that this section of the river no longer shifts its course. As silt accumulates, the riverbanks are becoming covered with vegetation, and this cultural waterscape is beginning a slow transformation into landscape. As the piece builds, we play with “accumulation” in terms of the layering of loops drawn from the field recording. We also layer in beats made from plucking TYΦA’s cattail cordage-strings to ultimately take the piece in a cacophonous direction, suggestive less of romantic idyll than existential uncertainty. Kraus’s phrase \"He who destroys nature, destroys himself\" is literally embedded as audible filtering processes in the second half of the piece, and the text can be seen when opening the piece in a spectral audio editor.\"\n\nSection of the river Lech reimagined by TYΦA.\n\n-------\n\nFlow is a creative exploration telling the story of a river through the power of sound. The project is a collaboration between the University of Padova and the University of Würzburg, with support from Cities and Memory. Explore the full project at https://citiesandmemory.com/flow.","author_name":"Cities and Memory - remixing the world","author_url":"https://audioboom.com/channels/2138625-cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world","provider_name":"Audioboom","provider_url":"https://audioboom.com","width":480,"height":95,"thumbnail_url":"https://audioboom.com/i/43627011/600x600/c","thumbnail_width":600,"thumbnail_height":600,"html":""}