Boomkat – June 2024
Elaine Mitchener: Solo Throat
“It’s mischievous, transformative material that helps bring lively, confounding poetry into new dimensions. Anyone who’s interested in all the many forms of sound poetry will find a huge amount of inspiration right here.”
Luminous, flexible and vitally dynamic vocal expressions from forward-thinking free improv vet Elaine Mitchener, well-known for her collaborations with Moor Mother, Christian Marclay, Apartment House and David Toop, among others. Properly synapse-popping, deeply idiosyncratic gear – recommended for fans of Audrey Chen, Robert Ashley, François Dufrêne, Elvin Brandhi.
Deconstructing her own work alongside words taken from African-American and African-Caribbean poets like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Una Marson, Mitchener questions the way we listen, bending her phrases into ululations, whispers, and hoarse, guttural gasps. Although ‘Solo Throat’ is her debut solo release, she’s been tearing through the avant-garde’s outer rim for years at this point, augmenting work from composers, ensembles, producers, visual artists and choreographers with her elastic vocalisations.
Here, she focuses her technique, letting her unconventional rhythmic cadences flutter and buzz around loose, discernible words that lodge themselves in the mind like tiny hooks. Without accompaniment, her agile, gruelling process is placed under the microscope; falling nto a space more closely aligned with François Dufrêne’s radical sound poetry or Audrey Chen’s limber voice work.
“Sound variegated through beneath lit,” she repeats in annunciated tones on ‘gyre’s galax’, pulling the words from the Umbra collective’s Norman Henry Pritchard’s poem of the same name. Pritchard’s graphical style – where he would fill the pages with artfully spaced words to suggest rhythm and cadence – is integrated by Mitchener as a sonic meter, the tongue-twisting segments creating a hypnotic, pulsating mantra. In the original poem, Pritchard accents the passages by varying the spelling of “through” and “thru”, which Mitchener takes as a cue to add an almost melodic coda to the word. She plays it relatively straight, allowing us to hear her voice at its most bare, paying respect to Pritchard’s under-appreciated foresight.
On her rendition of Jamaican activist and writer Una Marson’s ‘Towards the Stars’, she imagines the short, more formally logical poem in two parts, singing softly and cleanly on the first ‘black mantle’, before filtering her voice into slowed, ghost traces on the second. Conversing with Barbadian poet and academic Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘(i) Libation’, ‘(ii) The Making of the Drum’, (v) ‘The Gong-Gong’, Mitchener forms percussive clicks and stutters around his words. “God is dumb / until the drum / speaks,” she mutters over fizzing, ASMR rhythms. While on ‘rush hush’ to highlight Prichard’s unusual chopped vowels and consonants, she turns ‘The Voice’ into hisses, whirrs and fictile cries, sounding as if she’s whispering incantations while simultaneously inverting one of Robert Ashley’s fractured operas.
It’s mischievous, transformative material that helps bring lively, confounding poetry into new dimensions. Anyone who’s interested in all the many forms of sound poetry will find a huge amount of inspiration right here.