Mira Calix

Mira Calix earned acclaim as a U.K.-based composer, producer, DJ, and artist who moved fluidly across disciplines. After first gaining notice for abstract electronic music issued from the mid-'90s onward, she went on to collaborate with chamber orchestras, contemporary ensembles, and galleries, producing multimedia installations alongside scores for dance, film, and theater. Warp signed her in 1996, and her initial releases—1998’s Pin Skeeling and 2000’s One on One—merged brittle, distorted beats with obscured vocals and restless textures often drawn from natural sources. Beginning in 2003 she worked regularly with the London Sinfonietta; later projects such as 2004’s 3 Commissions and 2008’s The Elephant in the Room presented her orchestral writing. Beyond solo activity she joined the Alexander’s Annexe project and recorded with Mark Clifford of Seefeel under the name Cliffordandcalix. In 2019 she revisited her earlier IDM aesthetic on the EP Utopia, while 2021’s absent origin reassembled scores and pieces she had composed over the preceding decade.

Born Chantal Passamonte in Durban, South Africa, she relocated to London in 1991. She took a position at the Ambient Soho record store and helped stage the eclectic club series Telepathic Fish. After a stint at 4AD she joined Warp as a publicist in 1994 and also served as a resident DJ for the label’s Blech club night. Adopting the name Mira Calix, she issued her debut 12", Ilanga, on Warp in 1996, then the 1998 EP Pin Skeeling, which included a Boards of Canada remix. A Peel Session EP and the full-length One on One both appeared in 2000, reflecting shoegaze influences alongside ambient and experimental techno. The Prickle EP followed in 2001, and her second album, Skimskitta, arrived in 2003.

That same year she released Nunu, an excerpt from a 2002 Geneva festival work that incorporated live insects. She performed the piece with the London Sinfonietta at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2003; excerpts from both renditions appeared on 3 Commissions in 2004, after which the work toured internationally. With London Sinfonietta pianist Sarah Nicolls and sound designer David Sheppard she formed Alexander’s Annexe, whose album Push Door to Exit came out on Warp in 2006. Eyes Set Against the Sun, issued in early 2007, featured the Britten-Pears Orchestra, Streetwise Opera, and the Woodbridge School Junior Choir. The Elephant in the Room, containing commissioned pieces that included collaborations with cellist Oliver Coates, followed in 2008. Her surround-sound installation My Secret Heart, commissioned by Streetwise Opera and premiered in December 2008, received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and a British Composer Award in 2009. Also that year she and Coates supplied a cover of Boards of Canada’s “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country” to the Warp20 (Recreated) compilation.

Andrea Parker’s Aperture label issued Lost Foundling 1999-2004 by Cliffordandcalix, her duo with Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, in 2010. Throughout much of the decade Calix concentrated on composing for film, opera, and theater rather than issuing recordings; she collaborated with poet Alice Oswald and ensemble Bang on a Can in 2010. Her choral score for Fables: A Film Opera earned a British Composer Award nomination in 2011. If Then While For, written for the Ada Project with Conrad Shawcross, appeared as a one-sided Vinyl Factory EP in 2014. The large-scale installation Inside There Falls premiered at the Sydney Festival in 2015. The next year she presented Moving Museum 35, a temporary mixed-media work placed aboard a public bus in Nanjing, China, developed with students from the Nanjing University of the Arts. In 2017 she composed organ pieces for the Organ Reframed event at London’s Union Chapel. Returning to Warp in 2019, she issued the four-track EP Utopia, whose minimal, angular electronics and vocals echoed her earlier label output. The collage-style full-length absent origin, released in 2021, drew inspiration from Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse. In March 2022 Warp announced that Calix had died.