Otoroku DL/LP
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Pushing boundaries is nothing new for experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener. Stewart Smith hears how her bold reworking of songs plays an important role in promoting the work of black avant-garde composers.”
“Mitchener’s performance was quite simply extraordinary. She held nothing back in her traversal of the enormous vocal range of the work, and her total inhabiting of the character was the enduring memory of the evening.”
“They are among the most versatile and go-getting singers of our time. Elaine Mitchener deepened her love of singing as a teenager, through gospel music and jazz, and later through classical training at the conservatory. Juliet Fraser did not begin singing seriously until she was 20 years old – until then she wanted to be an oboist. For both, singing was a need, a form of artistic expression, a fulfillment.”
