Mira Calix, adventurous electronic musician and audio artist, dies aged 51 | Tunes
Mira Calix, the electronic producer celebrated for her advanced, remarkably imaginative music and audio artwork, has died aged 51.
Her label, Warp Records, introduced the news, and did not give a trigger of loss of life. A statement posted to social media mentioned in element: “Mira was not only a vastly gifted artist and composer, she was also a gorgeous, caring human who touched the life of all people who had the honour of doing work with her … she pushed the boundaries involving electronic audio, classical audio and artwork in a actually exclusive way.”
Born Chantal Passamonte in South Africa in 1970, Calix moved to London in 1991 to go after a occupation in music, to start with functioning as a publicist for Warp alongside advertising and marketing club nights and DJing, ahead of releasing her songs with the label.
As with her labelmates, her perform realised the broad options of electronic generation in playful and adventurous songs that had roots in club culture but spanned a remarkably broad stylistic variety, touching on ambient, sounds, neo-classical and a lot more.
She introduced new music in the classic album structure, beginning in 2000 with A single on One and most not too long ago with the sample-major Absent Origin, produced in 2021 and hailed as one particular of her biggest works. But she also created new music for installations these as My Mystery Heart, staged at London’s Royal Festival Corridor in 2008, and the monolithic seem sculpture Nothing at all Is Established In Stone, made for the Cultural Olympiad together with the London 2012 Olympics, with Boris Johnson, then London mayor, stating: “Mira Calix has managed to wrest not blood, but new music from a stone, placing the new music into rock and building a new cultural attraction.” Other general public artworks appeared in all places from a public bus in Nanjing, China, to the Tower of London.
She also collaborated with opera and theatre businesses, like Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Corporation, crafting scores for productions of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus for the latter. Her 2003 operate Nunu highlighted the audio of reside insects on phase, though Inside of There Falls, a 2015 collaboration with Sydney Dance Firm, used hidden speakers worn by dancers in a cell, 4-dimensional piece.
She at the time reported of her boldly experimental yet populist technique, in reaction to aged listeners who liked a single of her installations: “The whole piece was completely summary, but it produced them feel anything. They did not say, ‘This is way too weird’ … Folks like fantasy. We know this. But folks also like fairytales. And they like abstractions. Art is not just for arseholes. Folks can tackle it.”
BBC 6 Songs DJ Mary Anne Hobbs was between these paying out tribute to Calix, calling her “such an ingenious, groundbreaking artist … generally questioning, usually pushing.” The musician Gazelle Twin claimed: “So so intestine-wrenching to listen to this news of these kinds of an incredible, inspirational and unanimously beloved creator.”
