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OTOROKU

Solo Throat

by Elaine Mitchener

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    140g black vinyl pressed in the UK by Vinyl Press. Housed in reverse board sleeve with insert featuring original artwork.

    Includes digital pre-order of Solo Throat. You get 4 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
    shipping out on or around May 10, 2024

      £22 GBP or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Pre-order of Solo Throat. You get 4 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
    Purchasable with gift card
    releases May 10, 2024

      £8 GBP  or more

     

1.
the sleepening
2.
invisible bodies
3.
unknown tongue
4.
black mantle
5.
black mantle II
6.
gyre's galax
7.
stretchedwoundspeaks 05:55
buy track
8.
rush hush
9.
their naked descent 02:42
buy track
10.
spittle 01:08
buy track
11.
tender as fly agaric 01:54
buy track
12.
slli

about

Solo Throat is the first solo LP from vocalist, composer and movement artist Elaine Mitchener. Drawing on the work of African-American and African-Caribbean poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard, these twelve new vocal compositions disrupt semantic sense, play with the margins of lyrical translation, and give rise to new voicings.

Elaine Mitchener is a veteran of vocal expression in the global Black Avant Garde, traversing free improvisation, cross-disciplinary music theatre and contemporary composition with clarity and joy. Most recently, Mitchener has been improvising and composing with the written word as source material - challenging classical ensembles with her piece (“the/e so/ou/nd be/t/ween”), and commissioning composers Matana Roberts, Jason Yarde and George Lewis to respond to the work of Sylvia Wynter (“On Being Human as Praxis”, Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2020). Her performance of Umbra poet N.H Pritchard’s text FR/OG at OTO in 2021 was a revelation - a solo vocal recasting of the powerful visual-material form that Pritchard uses to disrupt semantic ‘sense’.

Building on this performance, Solo Throat takes the work of Pritchard alongside poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Una Marson as its source material. Its compositions are a loose translation - a carrying from text to voice which holds multiplicity and celebrates the transformative power of literary possibility. Surrendered to the spacing and repetition of consonants and vowels, Michener’s exceptional phonetic freedom gives rise to a sensuous experience which intensifies the roles of rhythm, timbre and breath in expressing meaning.

Solo Throat comes together as much through difference as similarity. Mitchener’s own solo improvisations sit alongside the work of Brathwaite, Césaire, Marson and Pritchard, forming a constellation of unlikely alignments which make no aesthetic conclusion. Instead, Solo Throat is a site of encounter, an irreducibly plural de-composition of words into a heterogeneous assemblage of sounds and impulses, emphasising what Anthony Reed calls, “the play on and the surplus of margins of lyrical translation to resituate other pathways of expression”. Just as the poets cited use white space to complicate our act of reading, so Mitchener utilises silence and multiphonics to complicate the act of voicing and the way we listen.

—

Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Her regular collaborators include: composers George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, and Tansy Davies; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam van Huynh’s company; and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Pat Thomas, Jason Yarde, Neil Charles and David Toop.

—

credits

releases May 10, 2024

Recorded and engineered by Sean Woodlock at Hackney Road Studios
Mastered by Sean McCann
Layout by Jeroen Wille
All music and artwork by Elaine Mitchener

—

OTOROKU
18-22 Ashwin Street
Dalston, London
2024

OTOROKU is distributed internationally by Cargo and Forced Exposure. For any further enquiries about this release contact abby@cafeoto.co.uk.

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Elaine Mitchener London, UK

Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). ... more

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