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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.”

Over the last five years or so I’ve heard and seen the British singer and improviser Elaine Mitchener in various contexts, whether in a quartet with pianist Alexander Hawkins, guesting with Black Top, the shape-shifting project of Pat Thomas and Orphy Robinson, or performing an experimental solo work like “the then + the now = now time,” which I caught at MaerzMusik back in 2018. She has regularly impressed me, but 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.

The recording opens one of several overdubbed excursions that blend fragmented melodic lines with jarring techniques that flirt with decidedly ugly, visceral, and unsettling gestures that occasionally invoke racist or sexist violence and oppression. In particular, “unknown tongue” blends a vast catalog of sounds and techniques, including the clicking one often encounters in Kiswahili language, choking or asphyxiation sounds, and almost lullaby-like melodic fragments. It’s not easy to listen to, but Mitchener does more than just collect difficult sounds—some of which have blown my mind—instead layering them into a dense collage that smudges any easy polarities. Throughout the entire album she embraces complexity. If Mitchener continued down this path for the remainder of the record she would already claim a spot as one of today’s most original vocal improvisers, but she pivots to other equally gripping and powerful methods, adapting or interpreting texts by a variety of Black writers that I’d never heard of, but who are now on my list of interests. No single piece has knocked me out as much as “Gyre’s Galax,” a sound poem written by N.H. Pritchard—a member of New York’s Umbra group who specialized in visual poetry, writing works featuring fascinating designs on the page. Pritchard himself read the poem on the 1967 Folkways album called New Jazz Poets, and he does a fine job at bringing out the intense musicality in its phrasing, but Mitchener seriously ups the ante with her account, inhabiting its jagged, craggy lines with total commitment, pushing the sound of language in a way that’s consistently floored me, and this all achieved with one voice. Check it out below.

Mitchener’s overdubbing allows her to formulate almost orchestral arrangements of her voice, which can transmit all kinds of methods and sounds. In some ways the recording allows her to collate her arsenal in a single unified document, in relatively bite-sized pieces. But that comment shouldn’t suggest that these piece are somehow slighter than her long-form work. The stunning “stretchedwouldspeaks,” which draws on the writing of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, feels like four or five pieces reduced into a detail-packed six-minute suite in which diverse gambits are meticulously layered and edited into a emotionally-dense marvel. In 2022 Mitchener was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow, and the institution is welcoming her back this week for five-day residency beginning Wednesday, May 15 at the daadgallerie, with a varied program of performances, talks, readings, dance, and film screenings, all of it admission-free. On the opening day she’ll perform in various constellations with a variety of Berlin-based improvisers: Nick Dunston, Audrey Chen, Cedrik Fermont and Nina Guo. You can find the full program here.