During this residency, Rachel displayed a selection of current research and an audio work created during a residency in Leipzig in 2023, titled Half a second before it was said.

This residency provided space for Rachel to re-assess this audio work alongside new research in a ‘notebook’ style approach, capturing an artist in transition as she moves from one project to the next.

A collection of early research encompassing ideas around sound, writing and performance, including but not limited to:

Announcement, chance encounters, destruction of language, echoey spaces, embarrassment, Head and chest voice, hihats, Julie D’Aubigny, Krapp's Last Tape, lapel microphones, laryngoscope imaging, linguistic gaps, lists, live audiences, metronomes, monologue (surrounding , movie bootlegging, musical timing, non-verbal vocalisation, phonocentrism, physical trembling, pre-sound recording, queer opera singers (pre-1940’s), queer unconscious, recording/non-recording, repetition, run on sentences, spectatorship, soliloquy, stage direction, stage fright, tannoy systems, the conditions under which Patricia Highsmith wrote “the Price of Salt”, the concept of proof, the presence of someone’s voice, vowels, wind noise.

Half a second before it was said, 5’’ audio loop, rewired car radio, cinderblock, printed text on paper, Leipzig, 2023.

On Saturday afternoons, when I was a child, my father said he could predict the football results - win, lose or draw - based on the intonation of the radio presenter’s voice, hearing the result half a second before it was said. 

I understood it as a kind of divination.

Half a second before it was said, 5’’ audio loop, rewired car radio, cinderblock, printed text on paper, Leipzig, 2023. Image courtesy of Pilotenkeuche residency programme.