Review

Elaine Mitchener: Solo Throat

“It’s mischievous, transformative material that helps bring lively, confounding poetry into new dimensions. Anyone who’s interested in all the many forms of sound poetry will find a huge amount of inspiration right here.”

Elaine Mitchener – Solo Throat

Otoroku DL/LP

Daniel Glassman

“unknown tongue” might be the most impressive piece of all. Multitracking her vocals, she conjures up a drama of communication beyond language: her two characters seem to meet, argue, scheme, get frustrated, hit an impasse, muddle through, and finally begin to play and harmonise with each other.

Elaine Mitchener, Cafe Oto, London

Adrian Cross

“The evening culminated in Mitchener bringing together all the night’s musicians and all of them wheeling into free jazz reaching a crescendo from Mitchener that shook Oto’s golden ceiling filaments and had its audience screaming in delight. Powerful, indelible, of an ilk no stranger to Oto regulars, but utterly mesmerising and original and even disturbing for any crossing its threshold for the first time.”

Elaine Mitchener: Solo Throat

Vanessa Ague

Mitchener’s greatest strength on the album is her ability to say a lot with very little. She reminds us that poetry is not just words, it is something to feel deep within the body.

Elaine Mitchener delivers poetry and free jazz in a riotous London show

Mike Hobart

“The first night of performance artist/vocalist Elaine Mitchener’s two-day Cafe Oto residency delivered articulate spoken-word, shapeshifting sonics and intense free jazz.”

British Vocalist Elaine Mitchener Busts it Wide Open on Solo Throat

Peter Margasak

“I wasn’t prepared for the remarkable focus, ingenuity, and invention behind her incredible new album Solo Throat (Otoroku), in which her vast oeuvre of extended techniques, literary inspiration, and improvisational thinking come together into something far more profound and jaw-dropping than the sum of its parts.”

Apartment House’s day of delight, insight and excellence at Wigmore Hall

Christopher Woodley

“Mitchener’s versatility was to the fore in a graphic rendition of the piece, producing a tightly controlled primal scream as she literally found her voice, all aglow with the light of her upper range.”