Mira Calix, a composer, producer and visual artist whose work has included electronic music, orchestral commissions, public art installations, theater scores, music videos and DJ sets, died on March 25 at her home and music and art studio in Bedford, England. She was 52.
The death was confirmed by her partner, Andy Holden, who declined to specify the cause.
“She pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way,” her label Warp Records said in a statement.
Ms. Calix’s projects include solo albums, collaborations and numerous singles, EPs, productions and remixes; music for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s 2017 stagings of “Julius Caesar” and “Coriolanus”, and a 2003 piece, “Nunu”, which amplified the London Sinfonietta, Calix’s electronics and a cage of live crickets and crickets and shown on video screens.
She welcomed commissions to create public art.
“I like to change someone’s day,” she told music and cultural website The Quietus in 2012. “I love when people come across something without expectations. They don’t care who made it. They didn’t go to buy a ticket, so it’s not about being reverent. People can just walk by.”
One of her free installations was “Nothing Is Set in Stone”, an egg-shaped stone monolith in London that used sensors to respond to the movement of visitors with music. Another example was ‘Passage’, a permanent installation in a train tunnel in Bath that was converted into a cycle and pedestrian path with interactive lights and sounds. “Inside There Falls” was a paper-sized sculptural environment in a hangar in Sydney, Australia, accompanied by music and dancers. And “Moving Museum 35” was a traveling sound system on a city bus in Nanjing, China.
Ms. Calix told students from Nanjing University of the Arts, who worked with her, “We are not trying to make it easy for our audience. We try to make things come true.”
Although her pieces often used classical musicians and singers, Ms. Calix was not a traditionally trained musician. She became a composer by working with computers and samplers. Her music often drew on repetitions of minimalism and dance music, on field recordings of rural and urban sounds, on trained and untrained voices and on layered fragments and fragments.
“I wanted to bring air to electronic music,” she told Interview magazine in 2015. “I pick up the sounds of twigs, barks and rocks. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of combining the natural and the man-made. That combination is truly beautiful. The question of what is natural and unnatural is very open .”
Although her music is often described as experimental and avant-garde, she insisted that it appealed to the casual listener. In a 2012 video interview, she said, “People like weird things. People like abstraction. People love magic, and those are the things that motivate me to make work.”
Mira Calix (pronounced Mee-ra KAY-lix) was born Chantal Francesca Passamonte on October 28, 1969 in Durban, South Africa, to Gabriele and Riccarda Passamonte. She studied photography, but was an avid music fan, and with South Africa isolated by anti-apartheid sanctions, she moved to London in 1991 to have direct contact with the music scene. She got a job in a record store, Ambient Soho; she booked clubs and parties, including events with a collective called Telepathic Fish; and she started working as a disc jockey.
In 1993, after a job with the indie rock label 4AD, Ms. Calix became the publicist for the also independent Warp Records, which specializes in electronic music. Meanwhile, she began to construct her own electronic music using an early Mac computer and a sampler.
“The only thing that has really impacted what I do is lack of money,” she told Computer Music magazine in 2012. “I could never afford sample packs and expensive synths, so I looked for organically found sound instead. It’s funny, isn’t it? Lack of money limited the music I could make, but it also meant discovering my own sound.”
Ms. Calix married Sean Booth, a fellow musician, in the late 1990s, and they separated in the mid-2000s. In addition to mr. Holden leaves behind her mother and her sister, Genevieve Passamonte.
Warp Records executives heard her music and signed her to the label in 1996. She chose to record under the name Mira Calix after it “came up a bit,” she told Red Bull Music Academy in 2003.
“I wrote it down and it looked good,” she added, “and I really like phonetics. It sounded really nice, and it sounded like a nice person.”
The A-side of her first release, the 10-inch vinyl single “Ilanga”, was “Humba”; it ended with a repetitive vocal repetition: “Do the things people say you can’t do.”
Her shooting for Warp was adventurous and unpredictable. They can be noisily propelling or meditative and ambient, sparse or densely packed, raw or elegiac. She also toured as a disc jockey with groups such as Radiohead, Autechre and Godspeed You Black Emperor.
But her interests have largely been in multimedia works and site-specific installations, often in collaboration with scientists and visual artists. “I like to create the space where the music exists, and then you step in,” she told the website Spitfire Audio.
Installed at Durham Cathedral in northern England in 2009, “Chorus” featured speakers that swung from overhead pendulums, using custom software to control more than 2,000 sound samples interacting with light and movement. Her 2013 work “The Sun Is the Queen of Torches” emerged from a collaboration with a laboratory that created organic photovoltaic – light-sensitive, electricity-generating – materials. “Ode to the Future,” in 2018, was based on ultrasound images from pregnant volunteers.
Her latest album, ‘absent origin’, was released in 2021. It was a complex collage of her past and her ambitions. She drew on years of material she kept on her hard drive: beats (including using her body for percussion), wildlife recordings, past sessions with classical musicians, favorite songs and poetry, and surviving news footage, including DailyExpertNews’s coverage of the Jan. 6 rebellion.
They all became material for song-long, sometimes danceable tracks with feminist and resistance messages: explorative, playful and unpredictable.
“The challenge in my work is to emotionally engage my audience, and music is an abstract art form,” Ms. Calix said in a 2013 TED Talk. “I can’t tell my audience how to feel. I have to persuade them and guide them and hopefully bring them in.”
Alex Traub reporting contributed.
