Experimental musician Mira Calix is ​​dead

Electronic musician Mira Calix has passed away at the age of 53. Her label Warp Records has confirmed this. “Mira was not only an extremely talented artist and composer, but also a wonderful, caring human being who touched the lives of all who had the honor of working with her,” a statement shared on social media reads. She has pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a unique way.

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— Warp Records (@WarpRecords) March 28, 2022

In the concert hall with the insects

Mira Calix was born Chantal Francesca Passamonte in South Africa. In the early 1990s she moved to London to work as a photographer, initially working in a record shop in Soho. Later she did the press work for Warp Records – the label for which she would become one of the most style-defining artists. Between 2000 and 2021, the experimental musician released a total of six records there. Already at the beginning of her career she established an eclectic sound as one of the first women on Warp Records, which included different sound sources and genres in the productions – and thus established a kind of antithesis to the rather puristic electronic music on the electronic label.

Over the years, Calix has expanded her sonic repertoire more and more and has increasingly worked with elements from classical music. She has not lost her love of unconventional approaches in serious music either: living insects were used as sound bodies in a work for the London Sinfonietta chamber music ensemble. Considering her understanding of art, that was not shrill, but logical: Calix defined sound as a malleable, sculptural material.

Her art wafted across every imaginable platform

The artist filled a musical break with works for performances, theater pieces, ballet performances and cinema films. In 2019 she returned to Warp with the EP “Utopia”; just last year she released the album ABSENT ORIGIN – a “Dada dance record” composed of sounds, collaborations and samples of her older works and inspired by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and Henri Matisse. Most recently, Calix lived with her husband Sean Booth on the east coast of England in the county of Suffolk. Details of the possible cause of death have not yet been released.

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