- I first came across Mira Calix via her 2008 release Elephant In The Room a bafflingly cool blend of classical instrumentation and electronics on Warp and an impressively forward-thinking outing, even given the label's reputation for pushing boundaries and picking leftfield winners early in their careers (like Aphex Twin). Fast forward ten years and Mira Calix has spent the intervening decade eschewing recorded music in favour of working with installations and... maybe that shows a little in new release Utopia.
Opener Rightclick lopes into being with plucked electronic bass notes, drifts of noisey sample bursts, voice synthesiser and hand-drum. It's architectural more than lyrical, firmly in the art-music realm. Second cut Just Go Along continues in a near trip-hop vein, the insecure paranoia of the lyric creating a tense ambience that would be at home on a smoked out Tricky b-side. Upper Ups keeps thing broken: all off-kilter rhythms, twitches and twinges. It's texturally sophisticated for sure, but has that slightly acid-casualty edginess that only stabilises into a consistent pulse in the latter half of the tune, as atomised fragments of female vox in French, English and other languages intersect without ever resolving into meaning. Final cut Bite Me doubles down on the strange: gaseous synth tones stretch and disperse, as more disembodied vocals scatter through zappy percussion. Bit-crushed bells and beeps bounce throughout and it feels like this is the kind of record you're likely to hear sometime after sunrise, at the chill-slash-too-weird-for-the-dancefloor tent of the bush-doof; or on a sound-designer's top ten for 2019, but perhaps not much elsewhere.
Mira Calix developed this work to accompany a short film of the same name, and there's definitely an evocatively dense atmosphere that permeates the EP. Yet it's telling that the film only deploys opening cut Rightclick and does so in a way that is more spacious, repetitive and, well, stable than the way in which the same palette and elements are used on the record. It's as if the film editing process retained the grooves and hooks whilst leaving the hypervariable fractured exploration of those ideas mostly on the cutting room floor.
Warp and Mira Calix too, are definitely keeping things weird with Utopia. Beyond that? I'd recommend diving into her back catalogue for a better feel of what this artist is capable of.
- Kieran Ruffles.