SESSION 3: THE POLITICS OF SPEAKING OUT

29 March, 2024 - 22:15
Minard

 

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. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf (with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles).   Her regular collaborators include among many others: 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, Saul Williams, Pat Thomas and David Toop. While developing her own projects, Elaine continues to work as a collaborative and interpretive singer.   

 

Neil Charles is one of the most in-demand musicians on the scene, with a huge array of credits to his name, including Jack DeJohnette, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mingus Big Band, Jose James, Jerry Dammers, Courtney Pine, and Terence Blanchard. His own projects have included Zed U, with Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, and the more recent ensemble Dark Days, dealing with the work of James Baldwin. Most recently, he has been heard across the international scene with Gabriels. As well as being known as a bass player with a huge sound and immaculate sense of time, he is equally renowned as a producer, going by the alias Ben Marc. 

ELAINE MITCHENER / NEIL CHARLES

SPEAK[ING] OUT
Elaine Mitchener (voice) & Neil Charles (double bass and electronics)
performance

Drawing from texts and poems from SPEAK OUT, the first ever collection of writing from the Brixton Black Women’s Group, one of the first and most important black radical organisations of the 1970s.