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Elaine Mitchener about Working, Composing, and Improvising with her Voice

Ahead of a new Barbican premiere, the experimental vocalist speaks about her practise, disrupting semantic sense and her love for how people say the things they say.

Name: Elaine Mitchener
Nationality: British-Caribbean
Occupation: Experimental vocalist, composer, movement artist
Current release: Elaine Mitchener will celebrate the UK premiere of a new performance in the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, April 3rd-4th 2025. For more information, visit the official homepage of the Barbican.
Recommendations for Holborn: Sir John Soanes Museum is an extraordinary house museum and the smallest of the national museums tucked away in Holborn overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The interiors are exquisite and filed to the brim with antiquities, medieval and non-western objects, sculpture, architectural drawings, paintings… At every turn there is something of interest to see also artifacts from the Global South that have been plundered in the name of art and cultural education. I couldn’t think of just one place so I also highly recommend the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. It is an archive and heritage centre devoted to the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in Britain. It is truly an inspirational place to learn and celebrate the contribution and Black communities to British society.

If you enjoyed this Elaine Mitchener interview and would like to know more about her work, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

I’d love to know more about the vocal performances for your latest release Solo Throat, and the qualities of your voice that you wanted to bring to the fore.

My approach to SOLO THROAT was to allow the very different poems to inspire a myriad of vocal free-improvisations. There was very little preparation apart from bringing together the poets whose prose I love and have creatively inspired me for years. They also hail from the Caribbean Afro-diaspora: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard. I created 12 new vocal compositions which disrupt semantic sense, play with the margins of lyrical translation and give rise to new voicings by performing each poem as text or graphic scores, drawing on their syntax, texture, rhythm, vowels, consonants, meter, cadence. I dislike the studio recording environment, so I chose to treat the recording session as an intimate live performance experience, with the vocal parts completely improvised and multitracked in situ (with very little editing / post-production).

Do you need concrete ideas – or what some have called a ‘visualization’ of the finished work – to get started? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

As a free-improviser, no. Never and it doesn’t matter if I am working solo or part of an ensemble. The loose structure will have a beginning/middle/end but how that unfolds and in which order is never predetermined. This doesn’t mean I’m not listening or tuning into ideas from other players or other stimuli – quite the opposite – it becomes a heightened musical experience weaving my way through a warren of expression and searching for / discovering new sounds. There is a misconception that free-improvisers never or don’t need to practice. The best free-improv artists I’ve had the honour of working with do practice, technically, musically, and also continue to mine for sounds and ways for expression. Practice can be physically enacted but also listening / observing..
However, when I am composing a work I will have a kernel of an idea that I think about for a very … long … time ….

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

It’s always difficult because you have to commit to it. And it’s the first plunge (the same with free-improv). I trust wherever music takes me, and that it will be a transformative experience (and not necessarily always comfortable). Also, it doesn’t need to be perfect and that imperfections and problematic pieces are always learning opportunities.

Once you’ve started, how does the work gradually emerge?

Messily followed by razor-sharp clarity and hopefully understanding. It’s not a linear process for me but it all makes sense in my head! Face the fear and do it anyway. There have been times when I’ve understood my own works only during the performance of it or right at the end  – oh that’s why so and so etc …!

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

I enjoy hearing sounds that people make, not necessarily what they say, but how they say it. The rise and fall of the voice and the different timbres of expression, the hums and ahhs, the punctuation of speech. How that changes depending on the who the person is, or how similar things might be.