First, ambient electronics: quiet twitters and whistles approaching birdsong, as if synthesisers had been recorded in the wild. Then crooning, close to the mic but with all trace of melody excised to leave only the sounds of mouth and breath. Then finally something closer to singing – still intensely inward – that travelled the full spectrum from guttural groans and glitching vocal fry to exquisite bel canto resonance as the electronics bubbled, rippled and thudded.

As openers go, Yvette Janine Jackson’s Waiting was slow-burn, even gnomic. Other items in this remarkable programme of works for voice and electronics had more immediate impact – the no-holds-barred intensity of the word “white”, crescendoing to rawness and then looped, that began Laure M Hiendl’s White Radiance^TM. Or the faux-baroque sampled strings that launched Loré Lixenberg’s powerfully bonkers political manifesto-cum-arioso Cosmic Voice Party. From subdued start to exhilarating finish, however, the entire programme laid bare and revelled in the constituent parts of the human vocal apparatus.

Not just any vocal apparatus, of course. Elaine Mitchener is a singer who redefines what singing means. This was the penultimate performance of her five-year stint as an associate artist of Wigmore Hall, a venue where the strict conventions of art song have been polished to the highest level. The venue is not ideally set up for live electronics (two works had to be restarted due to tech problems). But Mitchener’s performance of Corie Rose Soumah’s Limpidités VI – all sips and slurps excavated from between the syllables of spoken language – and the struggle of voice against mouth staged in Amadeus Julian Regucera’s Bocca Chiusa were every bit as virtuosic and musically compelling as the Hall’s most venerated past performers.

Nothing, though, was more thrilling than the world premiere of Mitchener’s own Solo Throat remixed, reworking material from her 2024 album of that name with live electronics by Pat Thomas and Shamica Ruddock. Here Mitchener’s many voices were woven through an immense, hyper-exuberant electronic soundscape, her analogue vocal effects couched in a synthesised hall of mirrors. Audible words occasionally emerged from the melee – but meaning far outstripped the verbal content of this monumental tour-de-force.