Mira Calix, the UK-based sound artist and experimental musician signed to Warp, has died, the label announced. “Mira was not only a hugely talented artist and composer, she was also a beautiful, caring human who touched the lives of everyone who had the honour of working with her,” the label posted in a note on social media. “She pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way.”
Born Chantal Francesca Passamonte in South Africa in 1970, Calix arrived in London in 1991 to pursue a career in music. She worked as a promoter and DJ while doing publicity for Warp, before becoming one of the first women to sign with the label as an artist.
Calix dropped a few singles and EPs before releasing her first LP One on One—considered one of the greatest IDM records of all time—in 2000. She would go on to put out six more albums and several EPs of various experimental styles and textures. After a long hiatus spent working in film, theater, and mixed media, she returned to Warp in 2019 with the Utopia EP, and last year she shared the full length absent origin, a “Dada dance record” composed of found sounds, collaborations, and samples of her older work that drew inspiration from artists like Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse.
While some of her most experimental work was on wax, Calix also made music for art installations—she received awards from the Royal Philharmonic Society and British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors for her surround-sound 2009 work My Secret Heart—and wrote scores for opera and theater companies, including productions of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2012 she created the sound sculpture Nothing is Set in Stone for the Cultural Olympiad, which ran alongside London’s Summer Olympics. In 2016 she opened the Moving Museum 35 in collaboration with students of the Nanjing University of the Arts; the mixed-media project was installed on a public bus in Nanjing, China.
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