The South African electronic musician and multidisciplinary artist Mira Calix has died. Warp Records, Calix’s label, announced the news on social media yesterday, with no cause of death stated. “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 wrote. “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 moved to London in 1991 to pursue a cereer in music. She worked as a publicist for Warp while promoting club nights and DJing, before she started making and releasing her music with the label. Following a few singles and EPs, Calix released her debut album, one on one, in 2000. She continued to experiment with different styles and instrumentation as her career went on, performing with artists like Radiohead, Autechre, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. She also worked extensively with Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, releasing the collaborative LP Lost Foundling 1999-2004 as Cliffordandcalix in 2010.
In addition to recorded music, Calix’s work included multidisciplinary performance as well as film and mixed-media installations. She spent much of the 2010s composing for film, opera, and theater, working with arts entities like Royal Shakespeare Company, for which she wrote the scores for productions of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. In 2016, she opened the Moving Museum 35, a temporary mixed-media project installed on a public bus in Nanjing, China, in collaboration with students of the Nanjing University of the Arts. She returned to Warp in 2019 with a four-song EP titled Utopia. Last year, she released her album absent origin.
