Chapter 4.1: Voices of the River.

Against the Current.

Before the First Note.

The day was unusually still, as if nature itself had decided to pause. The lake lay perfectly calm, reflecting the sky without a single ripple, and even the wind seemed to have abandoned its wandering, resting somewhere near the old pier.

The lakeside house woke up lazily. Everything felt calm, warm, and familiar—the kind of morning when there is nowhere to hurry. It was that rare kind of silence in which every sound acquires meaning: the faint creak of a floorboard, the distant whistle of an oriole, the gentle splash of water against the shore. Those careful, isolated sounds did not disturb the silence—they deepened it, like scattered notes suspended inside a long musical rest.

Sunlight cautiously filtered through the crowns of the pines, its warm rays slowly gliding across the weathered walls. A cup of tea cooled on the table, left exactly where someone had pushed it aside for a moment to gaze out across the mirror-like surface of the lake.

Jürgen arrived without warning. It was as though he had caught the scent of his favorite apple-and-cinnamon pies from a mile away—the ones Clara had just taken from the oven. Their warm, spicy aroma filled the kitchen, mingling with the smell of fresh pastry and old timber. There was something deeply reassuring about it—the quiet certainty of home, needing no explanation.

— Hey, family, — he said as he stepped in, half-hugging Klara on the way and already reaching straight for the baking tray without hesitation. — Smells like I almost missed a turn just following this.

He grabbed a pie, bit off more than half on the go, and, still holding it, dragged me out into the yard. Hot steam hit my face, and for a second the world shrank down to that simple, comforting heat.

In the open bed of his old mud-splattered off-road truck lay two brand-new aluminum oars, their metal gleaming coldly as if daring the water itself.

I smiled, teasing him out of habit.

“Planning to race the lake? Or are you just trying to provoke the local ducks?”

Jurgen chewed through the hot dough, squinting slightly as if listening to something beyond the house, and shook his head.

— The lake can wait. I need to show you something today. Not far from here. Get ready.

We loaded the kayak onto the back of the SUV — plastic hitting metal with a dull, heavy thud that felt strangely out of place in the quiet yard. I grabbed a few pies, and we set off down a forest road, broken into deep ruts.

The comfort of the lakeside home dissolved quickly into dense conifer forest. The road twisted between trunks, pulling us deeper into a thick green darkness where light became viscous, like cooling syrup, breaking through only in thin diagonal shafts. Now and then, between the branches, fragments of sky appeared — pale, like faded steel left too long in the rain.

The smells changed almost imperceptibly: first wet grass, then sharp pine, and deeper still — the heavy scent of damp earth and decaying leaves. It was the smell of depth. Of places where time doesn’t move forward, but settles in layers like silt, where the forest doesn’t just ignore humans — it forgets they exist at all.

Jurgen drove in silence, steady and certain, as if this were a familiar highway rather than a road that grew less and less suitable for vehicles with every kilometer. The suspension creaked, branches snapped under the wheels, and the mechanical rhythm slowly dissolved into the forest’s silence, as if the forest was reclaiming even our sound.

When we stopped, Jurgen opened the trunk without a word and began pulling out the kayak. The cold plastic, carrying a faint smell of water and dust, fell onto the stones of the riverbank.

— We’re going upstream, — he said, handing me a life vest and a paddle. 

The wooden shaft was smooth and fit comfortably in my hand. 

— Further on, there’s a section near a collapsed bridge call the “Throat.” Just a normal forest river… but it changes there.

We launched the kayak into the water. Here, the river moved calmly, almost lazily. Its dark surface reflected sky and treetops like black glass, everything appearing slightly deeper than it really was. Pines stood along the banks, their roots diving straight into the depths, as if gripping something unseen. The air smelled of wet bark, moss, and that heavy rot-sweet scent that feels older than the forest itself.

Silence held the place, broken only by wind through branches and the occasional splash near the shore. But it wasn’t emptiness — it was anticipation. The water looked still, yet that stillness carried a deceptive pause, as if the river was simply gathering breath.

And the longer we stared into that deceptively calm surface, the clearer it became: ahead, beyond the bend, the silence would not end — it would break.

The Weight of Sound.

As soon as we pushed off, I felt the resistance.

The river did not simply flow — it pushed against the hull, trying to twist it off course, to force it out of line. And within that struggle there was already a rhythm: not the steady pace of movement, but a stubborn, uneven breathing, as though every stroke had to be wrestled away from the current. It echoed through my shoulders as a deep, measured pulse — as if someone were driving a kick drum into the floor, each low impact rising not from the air, but from the river itself, from the stone beneath us.

Cold spray lashed against my face, while the scent of pine gradually gave way to the smell of wet rock and rust — dry, metallic, as though we were entering an abandoned place where nature and iron had never stopped arguing.

That argument became most audible along the sharp edges. Wherever the current scraped against stone, a thin, rasping tone emerged — not quite a screech, but more like steel slowly dragged across rough concrete. It never overwhelmed the low rumble below it; instead, it hovered above, a high-frequency hiss that gave the entire sound an unexpected bitterness.

Ahead lay the Narrows.

The river, once broad and patient, squeezed itself between massive boulders into a narrow corridor. A bridge had once crossed this place. Now only concrete piers and twisted steel girders remained, protruding from the water like broken ribs. Rust bled down their surfaces in dark streaks, as though time itself were slowly consuming the skeleton of some enormous beast.

The closer we came to the narrowing, the colder the air became. It thickened somehow, growing denser, and every breath demanded just a little more effort. Sound already lingered within it — not noise, but expectation, like the sustained drone of a synthesizer holding tension without allowing it to break too soon.

The sounds of the forest had not disappeared — they had simply ceased to matter.

Somewhere high above us, among the treetops, birds still called, branches cracked, wind whispered through the needles. But none of it belonged to us anymore. It was someone else’s music — too light, too high, too distant for what waited ahead.

The real melody was being born below.

Between the boulders and the rusted beams, sound no longer travelled through the air — it rested inside it, heavy as a slab of concrete, gathering weight. It refused to let other sounds rise above it or scatter apart. It held them together, compressing them into one stubborn mass.

For the first time, I realized I was hearing more than noise.

I was hearing structure.

Beyond the bend, something was creating its own voice — low, viscous, almost tangible, like the breathing of something immense. It did not arrive from somewhere in the distance. It seemed to grow directly out of the stone and water themselves. The rumble did not silence the forest; it pushed it into shadow, making it feel remote and irrelevant.

There was texture inside that sound.

Instinctively, I began separating it into layers.

At the bottom lay the slow, heavy pulse of the river itself — dull and steady, like the kick drum striking not through air, but straight into the earth.

Above it, where water scraped across stone, another voice twisted upward — rough and abrasive, as though someone were dragging a piece of iron across unfinished concrete. That harsh texture carried the same industrial aggression I had always searched for in music.

Between those layers, trapped inside the narrow spaces between the rocks, hung a deep resonance — dense as a wall of bass that no high note could ever pierce.

The air here was no longer empty.

It was loaded with sound.

It felt almost solid, as though stretching out a hand might allow you to touch its density like fabric refusing to part. Even my own voice, had I spoken, would have sounded wrong — too light for a place like this.

“Hold your line! More to the left!” Jürgen shouted.

His voice reached me strangely muffled, as though water and stone had already begun stripping away the higher frequencies, leaving behind only weight.

I kept rowing until my muscles burned and my fingers grew numb from the cold.

Eventually technique disappeared altogether.

Only rhythm remained.

Stroke. Breath. Stroke.

My palms slipped across the rough wooden shaft, the grain cutting into my skin, every impact of the paddle against the water echoing inside my chest like a slow, relentless beat — the restrained, pulsing rhythm of a verse quietly gathering strength before the inevitable explosion.

The river hammered against the remains of the bridge with immense, heavy blows — not splashes, but impacts delivered by thousands of tons of moving water. Every strike resonated through my ribs like the heartbeat of something unimaginably large.

This was not the sound of water.

It was the architecture of resistance.

Water, stone and rusted steel merged into a single structure of sound — something built not to surrender to the current, but to withstand it.

We drifted into the calmer water behind one of the concrete supports, hidden in the current’s shadow.

Here everything changed.

The sound became deeper, stripped almost entirely of its higher frequencies.

Not noise.

Pressure.

There was no emptiness inside this silence.

Quite the opposite.

It had become too dense, as though the air itself had transformed into one sustained bass note held indefinitely, refusing to resolve. Even my own breathing suddenly felt intrusive — too fragile, too restless against the immense weight surrounding us.

The air seemed thick enough to cut with a paddle.

The silence was no longer the absence of sound.

It had become a force waiting to be filled.

I placed my hand against one of the cold steel beams.

The vibration travelled through my palm, into my bones, my chest, my teeth, as though the metal itself were trying to transmit its own frequency — low, massive, almost beyond the limits of human hearing.

It was a sound you did not hear.

You felt it.

It demanded no attention.

It simply existed, like a slow impact powerful enough to make your teeth vibrate and your muscles tighten.

There was nothing beautiful about it.

Only strength that never bothered asking permission.

The steel was not merely cold.

It felt both empty and impossibly full at once.

Like silence that had learned to hum.

“Listen, ” Jürgen said quietly.

“It isn’t the river making that noise.

It’s the steel holding the river back.”

For a brief moment I had the strange sensation that we had stepped inside a process that had begun long before humanity itself and would continue long after we were gone.

Water.

Stone.

Steel.

All working together, weaving something greater than a current out of resistance and motion.

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

Loudness flies apart through the air like sparks.

Weight resists.

It gathers itself into a fist.

And it endures.

When we finally dragged the kayak onto the wet rocks, our hands trembled from exhaustion. Blisters had torn open across our palms, and for a long while neither of us spoke, listening only to our breathing gradually finding its rhythm again.

Cold wind slid across our soaked clothes while the scent of the river — damp, heavy, tinged with iron — settled into our skin.

And somewhere inside that mixture of water, wind and rust, something became painfully clear.

Sound did not need to be beautiful.

It needed to be stubborn.

Not to fly like sparks…

…but to force its way through the world the way water forces its way through stone.

Slowly.

Heavily.

Inevitably.

“Did you feel it?” Jürgen finally asked.

I looked back at the broken bridge, still humming deep inside the silence of the forest.

The sound came from nowhere.

And from everywhere at once.

It hung in the air like tension itself.

Holding onto that sensation, I began sketching the skeleton of a future track in my mind.

A slow, crushing pulse below.

Scraping industrial textures around the edges.

A wall of bass refusing to let the sound fall apart.

Then the rumble transformed into something else.

A whispered synthesizer.

A woman’s wordless vocalise.

Like the echo of something that had already existed here long before we arrived.

And beneath it…

…a dense male voice.

Not singing.

Forging every word like blows against steel.

This would not be music about flight.

Nor lightness.

It would be about persistence.

About something that forces its way through the world’s resistance.

Not because of it.

But in spite of it.

Now I understood why the path of Metallherz inevitably leads there — to the place where architecture itself can speak through sound. Where music can break through like water through stone, preserving a melody within itself.

To the Iron Cathedral.  

  (from the notes of Viktor Stahl)