For Artcan’s Shapeshifters stand at Supermarket Independent Art Fair 2021, Rachel has conceived a sound collage paying homage to early pioneers and sub-genres of electronic music including musique concrète treating sound as material. Her process involves the layering and looping of sounds deriving mostly from ’found’ household objects repurposed as instruments as well as her own voice and the voices of family members. The work celebrates the words of Debussy: ‘There is no theory. You have merely to listen. Pleasure is the law.’

Credits: 
Alison Butler "laughing woman"
Brent Butler "talking man"

Shapeshifters

For Artcan’s Holy Fluff stand at Stockholm’s artist-run fair, SUPERMARKET, 26-29 May 2022, Rachel is contributing a sound collage about healing. The seed of the work was planted inside of an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. Rachel had a brain scan to look for acoustic neuromas, after her sense of hearing was mysteriously altered. 

The fMRI scan produces loud pulsating sounds which are caused by metal coils, or gradient coils in the machine, receiving electrical stimuli and generating a magnetic field. (The sounds are also affected by system-related instabilities, subject motion and physiological fluctuations.) Over the 20-minute duration of the scan, they go from jarring to trance-like, inducing an almost meditative state.

Rachel has a novel underway in which the lead character encounters Walter de Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977), an interior earth sculpture in which 191 cubic metres of earth cover 335 square meters of floor space on the second story of a building on Wooster Street in New York. This re-contextualised earth—a habitat for dragonflies and mushrooms in the middle of the City—softens the corners of the room like a colour field painting and produces a revitalising effect that is reflected upon in the writing, an excerpt of which can be heard in the sound collage. The real and imagined sounds which the speaker describes—seedlings popping, the respiration of a truck—are echoed in the fMRI samples also folded into the collage.

The novel experiments with a musical substructure which stems from the main character’s study of music theory, imposed as an interpretive framework upon new or inexplicable situations. For example, the Brahms Ballades, No.s 1-4, op. 10 factor in both formally and thematically. The No. 4 Ballade can be broken up into sections, one of which underlies The Earth Room passage, corresponding because of its lush chordal texture, grounding the listener after a highly chromatic and harmonically complex section. A recording of this section of the Ballade, as well as loops cut from the same piece of legato piano music—and the voice of a little boy narrating a fantastical Romantic story—contrast the staccato fMRI sounds heard in the Holy Fluff work.

Rachel Maggart