Chapter 4.1: Voices of the River.

Against the Current.

The Weight of Sound.

We pushed off from the shore and drifted almost silently for a few seconds. Clara was left behind us, while ahead the dark surface of the river slowly unfolded. And suddenly, I felt the resistance.  

The water was not simply flowing—it pushed against the hull, trying to turn us, to knock us off course. And there was already a rhythm in it: not a steady beat, but a stubborn, uneven breathing, as if every stroke had to be wrested from the river.

It pulsed through my shoulders in a deep, steady beat—as though someone were driving a kick drum pedal into the floor, the low удар coming not from the air but from the river itself, from the rock beneath us.

Cold spray stung my face, and the smell of pine gradually gave way to the scent of stone and rust—a dry, metallic smell, as though we were entering some old, forgotten place where nature and iron had been locked in a struggle for centuries.

The struggle was especially audible along the sharp edges: where water scraped against stone, a thin, abrasive sound emerged—not a grinding noise, but as if someone were slowly dragging a steel rod across rough concrete.

It did not overpower the deeper rumble.

It hovered above it.

Ahead lay the Narrows.

The river, once wide and calm, tightened between the boulders into a narrow corridor. There had once been a bridge here. Now only concrete supports and twisted steel beams remained, jutting from the water like broken ribs. Rust ran down them in dark streaks, as if time were slowly eating away at the bones of some enormous beast.

The closer we came to the narrowing, the colder the air became. It seemed to thicken, to grow denser, and every breath became slightly harder.

There was already tension in that air—not yet noise, but the anticipation of sound, like an ominous synthesizer tone holding the tension in place, refusing to let it break too soon.

The sounds of the forest had not disappeared. They had simply ceased to be the main voice.

High above us, birdcalls still lingered in the treetops, along with the dry snap of branches and the whisper of wind—but none of it belonged to us anymore.

That other music, piercingly light, woven almost entirely from air, had no weight against what was waiting ahead.

The real melody was being born below us:

at the waterline, between the boulders and rusted beams.

The sound did not float.

It settled into the air, heavy as if cast from metal, gathering into a dense, stubborn mass. It would not let the other sounds rise. It would not let them scatter. It held them together as if binding them with an invisible chain.

And suddenly I understood.

I was not simply hearing noise.

I was hearing structure.

Ahead, beyond the bend, another sound was taking shape—low, viscous, almost tangible, like the breathing of something enormous.

It did not come from far away.

It seemed to grow directly out of the stone and water.

The rumble did not drown out the forest. It pulled the forest into its shadow, making everything above us distant and irrelevant.

There was texture in it.

I began to separate it mentally into layers.

At the bottom was the heavy, slow pulse of the river, deep and steady like a kick drum striking not the air, but the earth itself.

Above it, around the rocks and boulders, twisted another sound—the same abrasive texture that gave the music its industrial aggression.

And between them, in the narrow spaces between the boulders, hung a low hum, dense as a wall of bass that no high note could penetrate.

The air here was not empty.

It was loaded with sound.

It felt as though I could reach out and touch its density, like a coarse fabric that refused to part.

Even my own voice, if I had spoken, would have sounded accidental—weightless and foreign in a space that had already chosen its key.

“Hold your line! Left!” Jürgen shouted.

His voice sounded strangely muffled, as though the water and stone had already begun absorbing the higher frequencies, leaving only the weight behind.

I rowed until my muscles burned and my fingers went numb with cold.

At some point I stopped thinking about technique.

There was only rhythm:

stroke — breath — stroke.

My palms slipped against the wood. The roughness of the handle cut into my skin, and every strike of the paddle against the water reverberated through my chest like a slow, stubborn measure—the same pulsing, broken rhythm of a verse that holds itself back, gathering strength for the explosion.

The river slammed against the remains of the bridge with deep, heavy blows—not splashes, but impacts from tons of moving water, each one resonating in my chest like the pulse of something enormous.

This was not the sound of water.

It was an architecture of resistance:

water, stone, and rusted iron intertwined into a single sound, a single structure standing against the current and taking the impact.

We took position in the calmer water behind a concrete support—in the “shadow” of the current.

The sound changed here.

It became deeper, almost stripped of its higher frequencies.

Not noise.

Pressure.

There was no emptiness in this silence.

On the contrary, it seemed to fill with weight, as though the air itself had become a bass note held to its limit, never allowed to break.

Even my own breathing seemed unnecessary here—restless, almost timid against that slow, heavy tone.

The air felt thick enough to cut with a paddle, and the silence was not an absence of sound, but a weight waiting to be filled.

I touched the cold steel beam.

The vibration passed through my palm into my bones, my chest, my teeth, as though the metal were trying to transmit its frequency—a low, dense vibration almost beyond the range of human hearing.

It was a sound you felt with your entire body.

It did not ask for your attention.

It simply asserted itself, like a heavy, slow удар that made your teeth vibrate and your muscles tighten.

There was no beauty in it.

Only force.

Force that did not ask permission.

The steel was not merely cold.

It was empty and full at the same time, like a hollow space that hummed.

“Listen, ” Jürgen said. “It’s not the water making that sound. It’s the steel holding the river.”

And in that moment, I had the strange feeling that we had stepped inside a process that had begun long before humanity and would continue long after us.

Water, stone, and metal were working together, weaving something greater than mere current out of resistance and motion.

That was when I first understood the difference between loudness and weight.

Loudness flies, scattering through the air like sparks.

Weight resists.

It gathers into a fist and takes the удар.

We rounded the concrete support and headed back downstream.

Now the water no longer fought us. It pushed us along, almost urging us home.

Soon we were back at the rock where Klara was waiting.

When we dragged the kayak onto the wet stones, our hands were shaking from exertion, our palms raw with blood and blisters.

For a long while, we said nothing, listening as our breathing slowly returned to normal.

Klara stood wrapped in a shawl, watching the river so intently that it seemed she, too, was trying to understand exactly what we had heard down there.

“Well?” she asked when we approached. “Necks still intact?”

Jürgen grinned.

“Mostly.”

She turned her eyes to me. I was just about to answer when Klara glanced at the wet towel sticking out of my backpack.

“And the pastries?”

I unzipped the backpack and pulled out the one survivor.

“This one made it.”

“Then it wasn’t all for nothing, ” she said.

I laughed, but the sound faded quickly.

Because behind her, the river continued to rumble—low and stubborn, as if it had no intention of yielding even half a tone.

“There really is something there, ” I said.

Klara looked at me.

“I know.”

“How?”

She tilted her head slightly, as though checking whether she had heard me correctly.

“I was there.”

Klara laughed.

“Your face. You’re not just tired. You heard something you hadn’t noticed before.”

I turned back toward the Narrows.

Water struck concrete. Steel hummed.

And the sound no longer seemed like mere noise.

It was like a skeleton—rough, heavy, but perfectly assembled.

Klara reached out her hand.

“Come on. Before the pastry gets completely cold.”

I took her hand.

Cold wind slipped across our wet clothes, and the smell of the river—damp, heavy, tinged with iron—clung to our skin.

And amid that smell, the wind, and the moisture, something suddenly became clear:

sound should not simply be beautiful.

It should be stubborn.

It should not flare up like a spark, but slowly reshape the world around it—like water wearing down stone over centuries.

“Feel it?” Jürgen asked.

I nodded.

Jürgen exhaled heavily, pulled off his vest, and ran a hand through his wet hair. Then he grinned at the dark water, as though thanking it for the lesson.

“You know, ” he said, “strength isn’t about pushing. It’s about keeping the rhythm while something is pulling you. Lose the rhythm, and the current takes you. Hold it—and the place itself puts you where you need to be.”

He paused, listening to himself for a moment, then added more quietly:

“It’s like bass. It pulls everything with it. Fight it, and you just get thrown off. But if you feel where it gives you support, you stand.”

“But the voice follows the current, ” Klara added. “Let it be a trace, not a stone in the road.”

I looked at the ruined bridge, still humming dully in the silence of the forest.

The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once—from the water, the steel, the air itself.

Holding on to that feeling, I began to sketch the skeleton of a future track in my mind: “Through the Storm.”

I heard the rumble becoming a whisper of synthesizers, a female vocalise like an echo of something that had been here long before us.

And then—a dense, low male voice, not singing but hammering out the words like blows against steel.

This would not be flight.

Not lightness.

This would be music that did not ask for a way through.

It would break its own path.

Not because the world allowed it.

But in spite of it.

Now I understood why the path of Metallherz inevitably led toward places where architecture itself could speak to sound.

Toward places where music could pass through any resistance and preserve the one thing that mattered most:

the melody.

Toward the Iron Cathedral.

  (from the notes of Viktor Stahl)

The song Through the Storm / Metallherz — listen, read the lyrics and translation. Album “Inspirïert von Lena Liri” vol. 2. Valkyrie. (In Spite Of, Not Because Of).