R Elizabeth is the alternative name used by artist, composer and researcher Rachael Finney. Where Finney’s academic work explores histories and cultures surrounding pop production and recording technologies R Elizabeth seeks to frame these interests via a different lens. Working predominantly with reel to reels tape machines, magnetic tape, vintage casio keyboards and voice R Elizabeth explores how we might think about pop through the lens of ‘sonics’ rather than simply music. Considering the sonics of pop music R Elizabeth often straddles the spaces between experimental composition and pop arrangement. In working with tape here R Elizabeth explores the ways in which her machines can be used not simply to record but as both instruments and compositional tools.
Selected Releases
The First Cut is the Only Cut (2025)
Forthcoming
Every and All We Voyage on
Album LP
Nightschool Records
Recorded using a single 80s Casio keyboard, reel-to-reel tape manipulation, piano and vocal, Finney’s practice with R. Elizabeth belies a studious attention to detail. Her academic work is often focused on analysing sounds – particularly voice and language – divorced from meaning and R. Elizabeth challenges the listener with overtly emotional tropes: sweeping portmento lap-steel guitar keyboard tones on Back From Ten suggest a nostalgic melancholy when it intersects with the narrator closing her eyes, realising she has nothing left to give. The lilting vocal cloaked in reverb is disarming, with an almost child-like surrender to the undertow of the song. On Tragedy And Trade there’s a rough grace to the mixing with visceral, manipulated tape sounding like the artists’ hands are literally in the speakers wrenching the melodies in mid-air. When it intersects with chants about the “gaps and the silences” it has an eerie, hauntological effect. R. Elizabeth is constantly playing with sound and song: a Wonderland of perceived emotion, the listener’s perception of what they’re hearing constantly in flux, it’s deceptively simple and deserving of repetitive listening.
Cut Piano opens the album and introduces a documentary-feel which the album upholds through-out. It’s the sound of the artist mangling a tape of her own piano recording, twisting it out of shape and suggesting a bend in reality. We’re listening to the artist becoming a ghost in her own machine, a 3rd or 4th generation copy of an emotion rendered a long time ago, chilling and playful at the same time. An Image Is Different bursts out of this with a sunny Casiotone beat, a melodic contrast that also introduces Finney’s vocal. It flitters between a gorgeous repetitive melody ruminating about the nature of reality and a seemingly careless, conversational tone. The effect is joyful, but you don’t really know why. The lyrics instruct someone (you? The artist?) to “go outside and break someone’s neck, make it feel so real” before ending with R. Elizabeth nonchalantly stating “I dunno, to be honest I don’t really care” as if on the phone to someone they’re bored with. It would be jarring if it wasn’t so catchy and uplifting. The title track is a slow-tempo meditation with droning synths providing the background to slow, dragging tape sounds and grounding, just-out-of-focus vocals bunkering down in the mix. The methodology suggests the work of Broadcast: there’s a loping bassline that propels the track forward but the duet/duel between Finney’s haunted vocal and the soloing tape warble provides aural snakes for the listener’s ear to follow.
Spiritual To Symphony is the brightest, most unabashed example of what R.Elizabeth achieves on Every And All We Voyage On. It’s utopian, bright and hypnotic: over a repetitive hook, a double tracked vocal intones a kind of post-structuralist, feminist manifesto: “A different kind of intimacy, a kind of female masculinity, I sense how to be, from vision to visuality.” It’s the perfect example of a piece of music that can be taken on its own terms, enjoyed as pure sound massaging the receptors in the brain or as something that can be dissected, it’s a microcosm of the album as a whole. Effortless and endlessly playful, the album is constantly shifting in and out of focus, from airy imagination to earthy reality. R. Elizabeth invites you to take the sound however you want it. Maybe she doesn’t really care, maybe she does. Who really knows?
Pen Pals Vol. One
Ransom Note
R Elizabeth & Burko ‘Like To Lie’
About:
Over the last month, the music and events industry has entered unchartered territory due to the Covid-19 lockdown, and artists and online media have found themselves in a financially vulnerable position with much more time on their hands.
To help some of those artists, and provide Ransom Note with much-needed financial support, three weeks ago we reached out to some friends of the website with the challenge to make a track in collaboration with another producer, musician or vocalist, remotely, in 10 days. The result is ‘Pen Pals’: a compilation featuring 15 collaborations from 32 artists.
Due to the current situation we’ve increased royalties for all artists involved and, whilst the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions apply, accounting will be processed fortnightly. Profits from the compilation will also provide financial support for Ransom Note who have been heavily impacted by the halt of the events industry.’
Rough Imaginary Compilation (Various Artists)
Home Normal
Featuring compositions and tracks from R Elizabeth including One With Two, I am Congessing, and Rough Imaginary
About:
‘On April 15th 2016, we hosted a rare live event at London Fields Brewery with ISAN, Paco Sala, A New Line (Related), and R. Elizabeth. Prior to the concert, the artists came together to create a wonderful collection of rare unreleased and live works that flowed beautifully together and inspired us to create this album in celebration of the coming together of such great artists and friends on a truly wonderful night. We are incredibly proud to present this collective work, 'Rough Imaginary'.’
Season of Error
Cassette and Digital release
Where to Now? Records
About:
‘Another wonderfully queer episode from Where To Now?; six tracks of bittersweet, avant synth-pop collage by R Elizabeth - a former member of indie rock trio La La Vasquez.
'Season Of Error' is liberally peppered with niggling pop hooks yet remains intangibly out of reach and mercurial, with queasy effect in the murkily distanced mixing of 'The Timid Habit of the Skin' but much lighter on the mind with the frothing pop of 'Giving Shape', but even here she juxtaposes feathered loops with all manner of discordant samples.
It's hard to escape comparison with earlier Julia Holter, especially in the woozy organ and elegant vocals of the title track and the airborne avant-trap hymn, 'Visions of Excess'. ‘
