The Wire – April 2026
Elaine Michener: Are ‘Friends’ Electric?
Hugh Morris
How long before we start talking about Elaine Mitchener as a genre?
Hugh Morris
How long before we start talking about Elaine Mitchener as a genre?
★★★★★
The vocalist travels the full spectrum of the human voice, from subdued sounds of mouth and breath to an exhilarating remix of her own hyper-exuberant electronic soundscape
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.
“Bold curating now about bold curating then, Deep Time runs deep and feels vital with satisfying, intermingling art forms.”
“Mitchener’s passions are deeply personal but also resonate with a broader community of artists, curators, writers and researchers who, through sonic and listening strategies, grapple with the question of what it means to pay attention in a world where this capacity is increasingly under threat.”
on third spaces, the limits of language and dismantling the notion that black artistic expression is linear and in the distance.
We caught up with Mitchener in advance of the event to talk about her curatorial perspective.
” (…) it is both the epitome of a solo record and somehow simultaneously its undoing.”