New music is prone to a documentarian impulse that is forever at risk of falling prey to the merely interesting. That catch-all aesthetic category – located by Sianne Ngai as a trained response to the circulation of information characteristic of ’60s conceptual art – is endemic to an art bent on eliding its what with its how. And while Ngai manages to spin the judgement into a productive deferral that solicits further engagement (‘we tell people we find works interesting when we want to do criticism’), she elsewhere acknowledges that, as conceptual art goes, the merely interesting promotes a real flattening of viewer engagement. She cites Lucy Lippard and Joseph Kosuth: ‘It would now be “more important”Footnote 1 … to “transmit the information about [the artwork] accurately than to judge it”’.Footnote 2
A similar problem faces the reviewer of John Eckhardt's 48k. The album, re-released in March on bandcamp as one part of Eckhardt's six-part series Depth of Field, seems to ask mostly for a bare extension or reproduction of its copy. Certainly, the more one knows about concept, the more rewarding (or is ‘accurate’ the better term?) the listening experience. 48k began life as a sound installation, the culmination of several weeks of acoustic research done in and around northern Germany's Kunsthalle Kühlungsborn. That building, abutted to the north by the Baltic Sea and a former site of rigid GDR border control, sits on land haunted by the watery death of the 5,100 political refugees who fled west from its beach. The title refers to the 48 kilometres of water that separated GDR Kühlungsborn from the island of Fehmarn, the 48 kilometres that doctor Peter Döbler would swim in 1971 in a rare successful bid to secure freedom. The album is an ethnography of this politically troubled place.
Seeking a kind of acoustic reconciliation between political instability, oceanic risk and architectural endurance, each of the three tracks follow a near identical arch (the final track in slight variation). Eckhardt's hydrophone recordings of water traffic in the Baltic are layered and transformed until his bass – cavernous and holy, augmented by his own live electronics – emerges from the gloom as if by magic. Taking textural cues from the underwater samples, he plays into the empty Kunsthalle, gradually cross-fading with impossibly low room frequencies sampled from the hall itself. Only the final track – ‘Feed back into the sea’ – departs from this model, mixing hall drones with watery residue in its final minutes.
Any music, however, that solicits an account of how it is made in place of how it thinks should raise some hackles. One can hardly fault Eckhardt's intention, whose social ethics here are spotless: music as a political force for the transmission and synthesis of information is good and heavy labour. But what might remain in question here is the question of the album, the need for its existence, and what becomes of this material in this medium. Because, so far as the music goes, it continues to behave as an installation: site-specific, localised and non-duplicable, as the liner notes make clear. Which is the beauty of installation: it attunes real environmental awareness by drawing on invisible presences in that space. When that becomes music for headphone consumption, however, it loses any haptic bond to place and asks to be judged on sound alone; it must likewise account for this translation (or vehemently, voyeuristically refuse to; see, for example, Áine O'Dwyer's Music for Church Cleaners).
Ethnography without a rigorous translation into creative sensibility is only an erotics of the archive. Art begins with an intervention that needs to be more than an assertion of difference. Form, in other words, must do something. Eckhardt approaches it in his transitions between states, when his sound sources are forced into direct negotiation. But these momentary glimpses of contingency are only sparing knots of energy in an otherwise detached album too intent on its procession of precious sounds, sounds whose symbolic and historical weight must be told to us ahead of time – sounds, in other words, meant solely for the circulation of information, reducing them, in the end, to merely interesting.
Medial ethics notwithstanding, if there is a musical critique to be levelled, it is only that the standing album feels too brief for the richness of the material at hand. The pace Eckhardt wagers is glacial, allowing for a real attention to granularity and a parallel familiarity with detail. At just over 30 minutes, this iteration comes up short, especially as the cycle of the form becomes apparent. The attention lavished on the mixing of the underwater samples – a masterful endeavour, with real reward – is out of balance with the relatively spare bass material that vanishes too soon. A version at double – dare I even say triple – the length, one that willingly forgoes the indexical nature of the material as social information in favour of the material as material would do these (very affecting) sounds more justice.
Eckhardt remains one of the most fascinating and promiscuous bassists of his generation, and after the years of force and fury with Xenakis, Ferneyhough and Saunders, it is a pleasure to be reminded how well he plays slow and quiet and still. He's spent a lifetime honing a breathtaking ability to throw clarity on difficult and gnarled forms; this reviewer only wishes the skill was on higher display here.
