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Solo Throat | Elaine Mitchener
OTOROKU

Gabriel Bristow

” (…) it is both the epitome of a solo record and somehow simultaneously its undoing.”

Solo Throat is Elaine Mitchener’s first solo record. Due for release in May on Café OTO’S OTOROKU label, it is both the epitome of a solo record and somehow simultaneously its undoing. The image of a solo throat summons a kind of radical exposure and openness not just one human making music alone but the sound of a single body part. However, despite the feelings of mortal vulnerability associated with the throat, it is also a powerful machine capable of both swallowing and projecting. Thus Mitchener swallows and projects poems, making her solitary voice multiple not only by way of the poets she draws on but also through extensive use of overdubbing. This is a solo throat in conversation with itself and an array of poetic and musical ghosts.

To hear this work of atelic modernism you have to distend your ears the way Mitchener distends her vocal cords. The album’s opening track is a good opportunity to do so. As Mitchener awakens (the 33-second skit is called “the sleepening”), lisped sounds escape as muffled murmurs before she breaks into wide leaping notes that display her extraordinary expressive range. The listener needs this brief opening span to dispense with everyday musical expectations. Sure, there are echoes of Jeanne Lee and even Billy Holiday to come, but ultimately “the sleepening” let’s us know this is not an album of crooning, scatting, nor whistleable ditties. It’s something much stranger.

Mitchener’s choice of poetic materials – drawn from the work of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard – forms a black Atlantic constellation centred on the Caribbean. But what’s more intriguing and obscure are the singer’s precise phonic, rhythmic, and semantic motivations for bringing these diverse voices together. What connects the eerie lyricism of Marson’s ‘Interlude’ to the surrealist scenes of Césaire’s “When in the Heat of the Day”? And how do they interact with the austere disarticulations of N.H. Pritchard and Brathwaite’s sombre intonations? Going beyond a generic banner of black modernism, Mitchener’s singing-cum-sound poetry actively creates a connection between these poets through the singular contortions and vibrations of her voice. Rather than uniting them in an abstract ethnic canon with predictable borders, her voice brings them together through a process of visceral physical embodiment that remains immanently conceptual – a thoroughly corporeal form of poetic knowledge that R. A. Judy might describe as “flesh thinking.” There are no guarantees here. Mitchener has chosen her company, but ultimately she has to go it alone. It is her singing that must make something of the words.

What she does with the words is cut them up and stretch them. The result is language split open along its phonic seams. In the case of her use of N.H. Pritchard’s poetry, language is doubly estranged from itself in an attempt to create oblique new meanings. The track “rush hush” is a good example. A treatment of Pritchard’s “The Voice,” Mitchener takes cues from the way the poem is arranged on the page: the fracturing of words and lines into single letters and clusters creates a sense of phonic and semantic haze that the singer seems to use as a musical score. The poem looks to me like it lives between the fear of a loss of meaning and the soothing sounds of the seashore – language is estranged from itself to make space for nature’s voice in the shape of birds, sand, and sea. Mitchener’s rendering extends this estrangement: the poem’s words are perhaps even less easy to make out here, and thus “the voice” – Mitchener’s voice – becomes sheer sound: “the rush/lingering/from the voice/of a drop falling.”

As a whole, Solo Throat is pitched at the outer edges of what it means to speak and make music. Those drawn to the far side of communication will want to listen in.