Sound.

For Artcan’s Holy Fluff stand at Stockholm’s artist-run fair, SUPERMARKET, 26-29 May 2022, Rachel contributed 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.