48k was produced as a sound installation at Kunsthalle Kühlungsborn, a historical reading hall located in Northern Germany directly on the banks of the Baltic Sea. Here, a bass guitar was literally tuned to the place where many people risked it all to escape from political repression, and quite some of them lost their lives...

Essentially a traditional sea spa, Kühlungsborn has a long and eventful history that includes being the site of rigid border controls during the years of the GDR (1961-1989). The official records count nearly 6000 attempted flights, of which only some 900 succeeded, often with unusual and thought-out escape plans. The piece is dedicated to Peter Döbler, who in June 1971 swam 48 Kilometres straight to the island of Fehmarn.

All three parts rely on the same elements and points of departure. Each piece begins with an underwater field recording of the Baltic, produced by John Eckhardt with special hydrophones from a boat a few kilometers from the shore right outside of the hall.

These surprisingly noisy recordings (e.g. sea traffic which can really be heard for miles under water) are carefully crossfaded into atmospherical musical pieces. These pieces always start out by imitating different characteristics of the field recordings with a special setup of bass guitar and live-electronics. Thus starting their life as an indiscernible copy of the underwater sound, these instrumental sounds eventually develop and are left alone as living harmonic and rhythmic compositions in their own right.

Towards the end of each part, these pieces are confronted with specific low pitches. Each of these pitches represents a room mode / resonance of the actual exhibition hall and was carefully researched and recorded (again by means of the bass guitar) during several days of preparative work on location. Like all of the sound, they were played back from a P.A. accommodating good amounts of sub-bass. By definition as room modes, these sounds lead to special local acoustical phenomena such as standing waves, thus leaving the listener with merely an acoustically charged, excited room, vibrating at its own frequency.

48k was the audio part of the larger multimedial installation "enlighten" with Katrin Bethge, analog light projections.