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Elaine Michener: Are ‘Friends’ Electric?

Hugh Morris

How long before we start talking about Elaine Mitchener as a genre?

How long before we start talking about Elaine Mitchener as a genre? For many years, she’s been a standout musician in her field, a gregarious performer moving fluidly through contemporary composition, improvisation, politics, sound art and movement to make punchy, vocal-centred music. Add to this her total command of her instrument and her recognisable vocabulary (built upwards from a deconstructed approach to language), and to write for Mitchener today is to write for Pierrot ensemble or string quartet.
2026 is Mitchener’s final year as an Associate Artist at Wigmore Hall, and it’s interesting to experience Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, a programme unimaginable in the hands of another, in a space that venerates artworks over artists. No matter how hard Mitchener commits, it’s a distant-feeling concert. The lighting is dimmed and purple, rather than the usual bright ochre, and the performances are amplified by a slightly weedy speaker system. Only during the magnificent final stanza of S0L0 THR0AT does this freeze begin to thaw.
Are ‘Friends’ Electric is peak Mitchener, an artist who swings so hard and so often finds connection. Of course, there are misses. In her written introduction, she asks Chat GPT the question “Are friends electric?” and then transcribes her conversation with the resource-sapping, disinformation-generating chatbot. This is a rare awkward choice in an evening that unfolds as an essay on two of Mitchener’s fundamental concerns: constriction and release.
Of the five Wigmore Hall-supported commissions that make up the first half, Corie Rose Soumah’s carefully etched Limpidités VI stands out, its twitching sound design unfolding in a rigorously deployed sequence. Its concern is restraint. Amadeus Julian Regucera’s Bocca Chiusa begins similarly, but breaks out of its guttural interiority into longer sustains that sound faintly devotional.
Other works start unfettered and never relent. Laure M Hiendl’s White Radiance examines the politics of skin bleaching creams, elaborated on by Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter in a tape essay in the second half of the piece. The first part is a rushing monotonous phase-piece setting text you can find on SPF bottles. It could have done with a less theatrical delivery. Hiendl’s works are event-free accumulations of the banal – see their alluringly blank Seht meine Wunden… for Explore Ensemble – and I found myself too engaged with talk of wrinkle correction and “transparent rosy radiance” to engage with the later essay.
Loré Lixenberg’s COSMIC VOICE PARTY from 2023, a political broadcast from a party proclaiming that “everything should be ruled by the laws of music”, is a joke that I struggle to find funny. More theatrically effective is Jessie Cox’s Remains Unvoiced, Mitchener clawing the words from out of her mouth at points. It’s a fine, focused piece, though it gets slightly lost alongside more extroverted works.
Mitchener’s deconstructive approach to language and form means she’s often left playing with shards and snippets, collaging them together into something bigger. A live remix of her celebrated LP SOLO THROAT gives the chance to work with bigger chunks over a more sustained period of time. With Shamica Ruddock and Pat Thomas joining on electronics, listening to the trio play is like watching a shoal of fish: shimmering, darting, all moving in slightly different directions individually, but with a sense of the total collective movement. The performance breathes and reacts, meanders and then comes back into sharp focus.