In his revolutionary 1939 text Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal (‘Notes On A Return To My Native Land’) the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire, celebrating his blackness and independence of spirit, sought to ‘scream with such upright force that he would shake the foundations of the world’.

Vocalist-movement artist Elaine Mitchener draws upon this energy of defiant transformation, also found in the work of Bajan innovator Edward Kamau Braithwaithe, Jamaican activist-war heroine Una Marston and African-American visionary NH Pritchard, in a daring often deeply affecting solo set that sees her interpret verse and poetic image in her own unique way, fully stretching the possibilities of tone and timbre to create abstract soundscapes that are intensely primal and lushly operatic.

Yet the folk-like repetitive chanting, field workers’ choruses and flutteringly intimate counterpoint also underline Mitchener's faith in the word itself as well as the radical sounds with which it can be framed. An uncompromisingly imaginative approach to text that does credit to the power of the human voice, as well as the mind that pushes it on to previously unheard paths.