The Blue Hour

Bandcamp

Chantal Michelle - Excavator

Cherry Wine

First solo release from vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art. Solo Throat draws on the work of African-American and African-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard as source material for twelve new vocal compositions
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.

Solo Throat

ROKU036 - Elaine Mitchener - "stretchedwoundspeaks" from Solo Throat

featured artists: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/unline-frequencies-earshot-xiv
https://soundcloud.com/dmitriborn

Unline Frequencies

Unline Frequencies – Earshot XIV

John Chantler And Daniel M Karlsson - 6.12.23 [excerpt]

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands
by James Hoff

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies.

Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world.

Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream.

Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record.

Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind.

—

James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited and performed internationally. He co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books.

JAMES HOFF 'Everything You Want Less Time' (SP151)

Original Production Piece April 2024

Detox № 39 - Obi Uto

https://radiopunctum.cz/shows/motsion

May Motsion (@motsion-ua) by Andriy Kostyukov (@andriy_k) & AXT (@axtaxtaxtaxtaxtaxtaxtaxt) w/ timmi. Recorded live at Tendance Listening Bar. (@tendancedance)

timmi: https://linktr.ee/timmmi

Tracklist:
Kali Malone - Passage Through the Spheres
Piotr Kurek - The Art of Swapping Hearts
Carme López - Epilogue- Inflorescencia
Antonina Nowacka - Lamunan, Part 3
TMA - Kysucký chlad - Vrah
Leich - Pax vita salus
Donna Stewart, Mignarda - Jesu Dulcis Memoria
Daniel Meier - Tales from the City of Moloch
Adrian Myhr a Michaela Antalová - Zvony
SMUTOK - Tyahar Vazhkykh Nebes
Volodymyr Gnatenko - QurOp

Motsion 05/24 by Andriy Kostyukov & AXT w/ timmi

Session #8 - Sha99y

Conceptual record based on 7 letters exchanged between Sainkho and her beloved father who died in 1992. Sainko accompanied by the Kieloor Entartet.

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Kleloor Entartet are:

Joelle Leandre / bass
Sten Sandell / piano, voice
Mats Gustafsson / baritone saxophone
Mathias Kielholz / guitar
Lucas N. Niggle / percussion

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Letters 1, 2, 6, 7 recorded live at Moods Jazz Club, Zurich, 12.12.92 
Letters 3, 5 recorded live at the Solo Festival, Stockholm, 6-7.11.92 
Letter 4 recorded live at Andra Bocker & Skivor, Stockholm, 9.11.92

Letters

LR190 - Sainkho Namchylak - "Letter 5" from "Letters"

As you can imagine we are under huge pressure at the moment and are working flat out to ensure Cafe OTO survives this. The impact of this situation is extremely acute for small venues like ours and we need all the support we can get to pull through. Please donate what you can, if you can. Thank you. 

Cafe OTO opened in April 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative new music that exists outside of the mainstream. It comprises one large cafe/performance space open during the day serving food and drink with an evening programme of live music almost seven nights a week. 

OTOROKU is part of OTOProjects - a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) that has been set up to manage the programme at Café Oto. Any profits from OTOROKU are put back into supporting what we do and will help us to continue programming the best musicians and performers from all over the world.

www.cafeoto.co.uk

LR190 - Sainkho Namchylak - "Letter 5" from "Letters"

cafeOTO

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