Rachael Finney

BraidedSOUND is a series of improvisational site-specific experimental ensembles that operate off a graphic score designed by Jesse Perlstein. These performances celebrate collaboration, improvisation and interpretation, ensuring that each performance is a unique experiment unto itself. Braided Sound also strives to be as global as possible, connecting artists from different backgrounds, genres and cultures both musically and spiritually.

Every performance is a chance to rethink the very building blocks upon which my compositional practice is founded, but invitational opportunities to perform with new creative collaborators in far away countries welcome both excitement and logistical challenges.

While this project draws on a deep familiarity with graphically notated score history, from that of Cage and Cardew and Stockhausen among many others, BraidedSOUND distances itself from the aesthetics and behaviors of "concert music" almost entirely—we are rather seeking to explore and define a contemporary use of the graphic score as a map, the compass and legend of which must be figured out with every single new performance, by every participating artist, together as a unit, in every new space and every different city, and using the hybrid sonic avenues of electronic and acoustic elements as its toolkit.

braidedsound.com

Braidedsound.bandcamp.com

https://www.instagram.com/braidedsound/  (@braidedsound)

The London performance features Kate Carr, Harmageddon, Rachael Finney and Jesse Perlstein.

"Poulson has taken peculiarities of technology as a starting point for his residency, with the aim to develop from it an idiosyncratic working method to investigate the library at Chelsea as a physical and dynamic space. Using the underlying motif of an analogue synthesizer, the Roland 303, to explore anti-systemic, intuitive and improvisational working methods. The project asks what ‘knowledge’ might be and how it is communicated."

Chelsea Space, 2017

Invited to be part of the work produced by artists Kit Poulson and Ben A Owen I provided improvised sonic material. This work helped form Poulson exhibition Mutter at Chelsea Space, London.

In addition to this I performed a live soundtrack utilising a series of reel to reel tape players for the artist talk held at Chelsea college of art in collaboration with Chelsea Space, Bookworks and Chelsea Library. 

Can I Just Say Something (2018) was commissioned by Cubitt gallery for the closing performance of the exhibition Is Now a Good Time (2018) by Florian Brooks. 

Responding to themes inherent in the work the performance aims to pose further questions around time, language and identity. Using a combination of prepared compositions for reel to reel tape players and real-time splicing the work will extend notions of ambiguity to occupy the space with continuous changing sonic landscape. As tape is fed and looped between players the machines begin to speak a chorus and collage of words and phrases. The artists body is framed as a silent device; a cypher that merely activates this temporal conversation.

Going Along Without A Body was a day festival exploring sound and ritual w/ Anne Tallentire, Chris Fite Wassilak, Claire Potter, Residents of Mildmay, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, RATTLE, Mary Hurrell, Libita Clayton, Nicky Hatton, Claire Feeley, David Raymond Conroy, Tom Ward, Fame is the spur, Kit Poulson, Rachael Finney & Cath Roberts (LUME)

It spreads in space where it resounds while still resounding in me 

- Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007)

In B.S. Johnson’s novel House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy (1971), a nursing home matron provides an introduction to the characters in the novel (eight elderly residents in her care) and the events about to take place: ‘we will join our friends dining, first, and later singing, working, playing, travelling, competing, discussing and finally being entertained’. What unravels is the story of one social evening spent together in a care home, told from eight points of view in exactly 21 pages each, starting with the most lucid of the ageing narrators and ending with the most confused, forgetful and in pain, whose pages are left largely blank. The book is a real-time recording of simultaneously unfolding thoughts, desires, reactions and interruptions – all taking place within the same time frame, all revolving around the same set of events, told again and again by the house-bound residents.

Taking B.S. Johnson’s story as a framework, Going Along Without a Body brings together eight artists and eight musicians: a continuous soundtrack running throughout this daylong event, with musicians dropping in and out as a backdrop to a loose schedule of performances. The day is loosely organised around a set of open instructions: dining, singing, working, playing, travelling, competing, discussing and being entertained. Among rituals of sound tracking, repetition, influence and coercion, this event seeks to assemble a sonorous body with a dissonant communion of voices.

In My Hands and At My Feet (2017) is a live performance with reel to reel tape. The artist undertook several conversations with friends discussing their earliest memories of what they could see out of their childhood bedrooms. Participants spanned from Athens, the city Manchester, the suburbs of Newcastle and the countryside of Wigan. The conversations were recorded onto reel to reel tape and then re-recorded again and again from reel to reel players in order to either slow down or speed up the descriptions. The fundamental speed of the tape recorders dictated how each voice would sound; utterance became elongated and stretched or stuttered in a speed that did not match the speakers body. 

As the players were switched on the artist led each reel through the magnetics heads of the player and then into the space. Tape bagel to pile up like ribbon; acting as a physical replacements for the bodies of which the voices belong. 

In My Hands and At My Feet (2017) was first performed at the opening of Black Tower Projects (London). 

More details to follow soon.

Latent gurgles, murmurs rising... a tone begins in the depths of the belly and strives in the throat before escaping – a burst of vocal dark matter. Writers Jennifer Boyd and Amy Pettifer curate a one-off programme of audio works for an hour of listening in the deep dark.

Just as the genesis of the Laboratory of Dark Matters' work began with nine artists travelling 1100m below ground to a dark matter research facility on the North East coast of England, this programme explores the transformations, mutations and possibilities that are generated in ultra-deep space; the vitality that lurks in the coved chambers of the body, in oceanic depth, in the ravine of the web, or the shadowed corners of subversive communal space.

Including work by: 

Anneke Kampman
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Evan Ifekoya
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Tristam Vivian Adams & Carey Robinson
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Diana Policarpo
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Sarah Gillett
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Rachael Finney
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Jennifer Boyd
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Amy Pettifer
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Tamar Banai

Invited to participate in HMN#8 curated by Chris Fite-Wassillak and Anne   Tallentire I presented a new series of temporal compositions to an invited audience. 

Losing Chorus is the title of the residency and exhibition project by London based artist Rachael Finney for BB15 Gallery. Throughout the residency the artist aims to explore the ways in which the audition of more than one voice can work to destabilize the sense of a definitive subject. As an extension of the artist’s current doctoral research in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths (London) the work considers the organization of voice and use of non-linguistic or symbolic utterances of female-based vocal ensembles from 1957 to 1967. By using those parts of the original recordings where an unrecognizable, non-symbolic utterance is articulated the work aims to create an on-going collection of abstract choruses that belong to an always already out of reach and invisible body. The extracted material will form the base of a set of new compositions to be constructed as large audiotape loops and played in the space via a series of reel-to-reel tape players.

Often associated with the term ‘girl group’ these recordings problematize our understanding of the performing subject and the visibility or audibility of those involved. Largely uncredited as individuals but rather named only by their group moniker many of the performers associated with these groups maintained at best only partial visibility and audibility. This lack of visibility and audibility is further enhanced by the interchangeability of vocalists by record labels and producers whereby the re-organization or replacement of vocals was common. This making unknowable and the invisible movement of voices and bodies further destabilizes the listeners’ ability to hear who is speaking but rather maintains the division between a unique voice coming from a unique body. This forced anonymity for many groups is further problematized by the fact that many of these groups were formed of young African American women whose contribution to the cultural activity of these period was great, yet remain largely unknown or at least unrecognizable by their very own voice. In For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression Caverero[1] asserts how it is via the singular voice that we discover who is speaking. Yet how do we understand these voices as they perform as a collective and whose relationship to their own voice is continuously unsettled by the way it has been made material.

By focusing on the collectively uttered and non-symbolic vocalizations of recordings this work will consider the voice as a sonic material divided from both a body and language. By using those parts of recordings where an unrecognizable, non-symbolic utterance is articulated the work aims to create an on-going collection of abstract choruses that belong to an always already out of reach and invisible body. By extracting only the non-symbolic vocal parts from the recordings the vocals will be dislocated from their lyrical origins and function purely as bodily and material utterances. The extracted material will form the base of a set of new compositions to be constructed as large audiotape loops and played in the space via a series of reel-to-reel tape players.

Throughout the residency the artist has transposed selected vocal parts from original 7-inch single recordings to three quarter inch audiotape. This process aims to reflect yet reverse the production processes used to create the original recordings. These new compositions will work to overlap with each other creating a set of continuous choruses. Over time the compositions will merge and intertwine with a slow build up of distortion from the tape players magnetic heads whereby any sense of distinct audibility between voice and machine will finally become impossible.

[1] Adriana Caverero For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, (2005), Stanford University Press.

The Chants Beneath curated by Jeremy Young

Featuring new sound work I Am Confessing (2016).

Also featuring work from:

Tom Carter, Yan Jun, crys cole, John Chantler, Christopher Tignor, Astral Social Club, Knut Aufermann, Greg Fox, Kathy Hinde, Giuseppi Ielasi, Dylan Nyoukis, Janek Schaefer, Chuck Bettis, Daniel Menche, Antoine Läng, MV Carbon, Yannick Franck, Simon Whetham, Nicholas Szczepanik, Antoine Läng, Stephanie Loveless, Mike Shiflet, Natalie Chami, My Cat Is An Alien plus more

Ses//Ze//Glas (2015) is a sound work responding to author Anne Wiednholzer's short story 'Sessel und Satze' ('Chairs and Sentences'). The work was commissioned for the exhibition Translation As Firework curated by Jen Calleja for the Austrian Cultural Forum.

About the exhibition:

Guest literary curator Jen Calleja will be hosting a performance and exhibition presenting multiple translations of a short story by author Anna Weidenholzer in forms including sound, ceramics, textiles, video, sculpture, photography, text, and even tattoos and recipes. 

The story ‘Sessel und Sätze’ (‘Chairs and Sentences’) is from Weidenholzer’s collection Der Platz des Hundes (‘Where the Dog Sits’) and follows aging school caretaker Ferdinand Felser’s preoccupations with his passive position in the world. Having been mocked as a schoolboy by pupils and teachers for his dialect and by his parents for trying to change it, Ferdinand is now secretly learning nine languages in his office and is troubled by the climate of xenophobia surrounding him at work, in the news, and among close friends.

Posing as a metaphor for the multiplicity of possible translations of any story and inspired by the Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic, the exhibition encourages the visitor to see how each ‘translation’ alters and adds to their reading of the story (which they also read in translation) and how the exhibition could be seen as one multifaceted translation. It considers a translation as a personal reading, extension, destruction or an attempt at honing into an essence of the original text by a translator, and will also explore the fallibility of linguistic translation by further experimenting with translations of translations, as well as paratextual elements that influence the reader’s reading like book covers, marketing, and book reviews.

5th - 21st March 2015

 A new, collaborative work by Rachael Finney and Anna FC Smith

Featuring Doreen Kutzke

Curated by Nathalie Boobis

Responding to the specific culture, architecture and use of the Swiss Church, the work uses the vocal act of yodelling to evoke the force of the voice without language and its powers of transcendence, communication and play. 

By capturing the sound and visuals of Doreen Kutzke’s yodels in the Church, and re-presenting them in the space as recorded sound and filmed image, the work highlights the fundamental tie between voice and body; emanating from the mouth and returning back to the ear. Kutzke’s yodels have become both a trace and an echo of her existence and experience.

Attention is drawn to the power of the voice without language to transcend linguistic limitations and the body, and to reach beyond the self in order to assert the existence of the self, like a cow herder in the Swiss Mountains using his yodels and the mountains’ echoes to assert his presence. The exhibition heralds the power of yodelling, an ancient mode of vocalisation to communicate existence, to connect with other beings, and to transform physical and mental space. These ideas are brought to life through the haunting power of yodelling and the physical and spiritual resonance of the Church.

Preview 5th March 2015, 6pm to 9pm.

Essays by both artists in addition to other work can be found in the exhibition catalogue here: https://hearmyvoiceandanswerme.wordpress.com

Les Parleuses (All the Things that Could Not Be Said) (2014) is a commissioned work for Dear Gordon curated by Caroline Le Breton.  

 The starting point for the exhibition was a discarded letter found over a decade ago by artist Jonathon Cole.

Interested in the material qualities of voice and ideas around the acousmatic the work explores the implication of voice within writing. Being unable to fully identify the author of this letter the artist ran its contents through speech software. this computer generated voice further dislocates the contents from any sense of an embodied origin. This disembodied voice is then returned to the physical by being transposed onto 3/4 inch audio tape and formed into a three meter long tape loop. As the loop is incessantly fed and played through the machine it slowly destroys itself until only the internal 'workings' or 'organs' of the reel to reel machine can be heard the the anonymous authors voice returned to silence.