Moving beyond the studio, Nichols became interested in the industrial developments and soft topography of the drowned channel system of North Jutland, where Sound Art Lab is located.

The Oddesund drawbridge became an important point of reference – an axis for moments of passage by ship, train, car and foot, which meet and amplify under this resonant metallic chamber. Under this bridge, murmurous glides of ship passage and the soft landings of fish bait cast into the Limfjord are periodically erased or drowned by percussive rail and road transportation overhead, and more subtly overwritten by the clank and clatter of flint underfoot.

Nichols' new work, 243 kHz is opening up a process that considers the fragility and environmental conditions of radio transmission, tuning into Oddesund Bridge as an evolving site of layered and tactile sonic interference. With the help of Jørgen Lindholm Pedersen, custodian of the Regelbau site in Oddesund, she managed to gain special access to the bridge control room, to observe the rhythms of the bascule lift and make recordings of its automated and mechanical features.

The title of this audio piece – 243 kHz – refers to the longwave maritime frequency occupied by Kalundborg radio which provided weather reports for Danish coastal waters until December 2023, helping skippers plan their approach through Limfjord currents safely. In this work Nichols has sourced and sampled the final broadcast from this now lost form of navigation transmission, which becomes punctuated by Oddesund Bridge’s alarms, mechanical movements and cushioned landings. These sounds shored up together in her studio, respiring, re-circulating and finding new harmonies, rhythms and interferences as she played them through morse code midi and reel-to-reel machines, plastic flutes and metallic tubes—materials from the site of the old Bang & Olufsen factory storeroom at Sound Art Lab.

During her residency, Nichols set up a test broadcast for this work using a 4-speaker set up inviting listeners to loop and circulate between the speakers. This installation is a draft for the next phase in her process, which is a choreographic exploration for a moving transmission of 243 kHz via multiple radios on, through and under Oddesund Bridge, programmed for 2027.