Mira Calix was an open-hearted musician who brought magic to the everyday

The Warp Records producer and composer, who has died at 51, broke out of the album format to make immersive, haunting, deeply human works of sound art

Artists whose careers began in electronic music are often portrayed – sometimes deliberately – as distant, detached figures. Mira Calix, the artistic moniker of Chantal Passamonte, who died this weekend aged 51, was the absolute opposite of that. She was as warm, generous and humane as her art, which spanned sound installations – some seen by hundreds of thousands – soundtracks, scores and sculptures, as well as studio albums and many collaborations.

Born in Durban, South Africa in 1970, Calix moved to the UK in 1991, becoming a central figure in the then-nascent Sheffield electronic label, Warp Records. She co-compiled two of its agenda-setting early compilations (1995’s Blech and 1996’s Blechsdöttir – the latter named by Calix in tribute to one of her heroines, Björk) before becoming a DJ, then a fascinating experimental composer.

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mira Calix, adventurous electronic musician and sound artist, dies

Producer released numerous albums of material and experimented with installations, sculptures and scores for Shakespeare plays

Mira Calix, the electronic producer celebrated for her complex, highly imaginative music and sound art, has died.

Her label, Warp Records, announced the news, and did not give a cause of death, nor her age. A statement posted to social media said in part: “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 … she pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way.”

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Destroyer: Labyrinthitis review – wayward, dance-infused weirdness

(Bella Union)
The Canadian rockers weave dreamy electronica through an album that buries frequent moments of brilliance beneath a bewildering collage of ideas

Labyrinthitis – an inner ear infection that causes dizziness and disorientation – is a good title for an album that’s dizzyingly, and sometimes pleasingly, weird. The Canadian indie rock veterans set out to make a techno record, with New Order, Cher and Trevor Horn also on their lockdown moodboard. It hasn’t quite worked out as planned, because Destroyer don’t instinctively grasp the simplicity at the heart of all great dance music. So instead we get fussy, endless layering and fragments of good ideas crushed into one another, topped with vocals that wobble from bizarre, mannered cabaret to slam poetry rap.

What saves Labyrinthitis from being insufferable is singer Dan Bejar’s great facility for melody, and the gentle new wave pulse on songs such as All My Pretty Dresses. Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread could fit into a Caribou set, and the frankly bonkers, sprawling June is one of the best things Bejar has ever written. Unfortunately, there’s often this vast emotional chasm in his music, a feeling that nothing ever means anything, until the final two tracks, The States and The Last Song, which prove that he can write a lovely, affecting lyric after all.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fred Again review – pop’s top producer steps out of the shadows

Albert Hall, Manchester
The low-key musician behind hits for Ed Sheeran and Charli XCX goes on tour with his own albums that tackle loss and lockdown

If there’s a universal language of pop right now, then Fred Again speaks it fluently, translating ideas into worldwide smash hits for artists such as Ed Sheeran, George Ezra and Charli XCX. Stepping out from the backroom, the south London 28-year-old, born Fred Gibson, is opening a tour built around last year’s one-two punch of Actual Life parts 1 and 2, two personal, sample-heavy solo albums recorded at the encouragement of mentor Brian Eno.

“I so appreciate you being here, so please don’t think that I don’t if I don’t say anything,” warns Gibson, hands clasped, early on in the set. He’s a low-key and smiling presence in a brown tracksuit surrounded by synths, keyboards and drum pads. Instead, the communication comes from a screen behind Gibson – videos captured seemingly from his phone, short bursts of text message. The set is described as “a sort of diary from April to December 2020”. Digital intimacy coupled with broad-brush sentimentality is in keeping with Gibson’s production style.

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by Fergal Kinney via Electronic music | The Guardian

Griff review – Brit-winning rising star is confident and characterful

Chalk, Brighton
After the baffling flop of her single Black Hole, the pop singer-songwriter is still ready to reach for the stars in this breezy, funny show

A year to the day before this performance, Griff won the 2021 Brit awards Rising Star poll, and her star has duly risen. The pace hasn’t been as meteoric as for previous winners such as Adele and Florence + the Machine, but tonight’s showing proves that the singer/guitarist/keyboardist born Sarah Griffiths has done the groundwork.

By the simple devices of a memorable “bubble” ponytail and challenging clothes – tonight it’s bodice-to-knee ruffles – she’s made herself recognisable, as confirmed by a flock of style magazine front covers. Meanwhile, her mainly self-written and self-produced electropop, which tends to focus on the dark corners of past relationships, is arrestingly moreish, and her on stage presence is confident and funny. Receiving a framed tapestry from someone in the front row, she’s genuinely delighted: “A cross-stitch! I want people to see it!” When another admirer hands her flowers, she carries them as she wafts across the stage.

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by Caroline Sullivan via Electronic music | The Guardian

Charli XCX: ‘People who take it too far are better than people who don’t’

The hyperpop star’s new album is an experiment into how far she can push the ‘pop star character’ she’s created. Can she stave off a rebellion from her fans in the process?

If you are ever in need of a stark reminder that social media is not real life, I can recommend Zooming with Charli XCX. Moments before I am due to speak to the pop star, she posts a series of images on Instagram to trail the release of her new single, Baby. On all fours in a tasselled leather bikini, with dramatic eye makeup and talon-like nails, she is the epitome of the provocative, vampish pop star.

So when she appears live on my computer screen, it is slightly jarring to see the 29-year-old looking utterly ordinary: dark hair scraped back, no makeup, grey baggy jumper and cradling a mug of coffee. Instead of dramatically writhing, she is thoughtfully musing – in the kind of unclipped, middle-class English drawl that makes everything sound deadpan and dry – about her 13-year career, the majority of which has been spent at the coalface of experimental pop.

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by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tori Amos review – flexing her musical muscle on an ecstatic return

London Palladium
Sounding as fresh as ever, the singer-songwriter swivels between instruments in an eclectic setlist scattered with cult classics, B-sides and covers aimed at pleasing the hardcore fans

‘You have been so missed” beams Tori Amos, sat astride her piano stool three songs into her first gig since the pandemic. The feeling is clearly mutual; the adoring front rows honour her return with three consecutive standing ovations, and you can feel the sense of relief ricocheting off the London Palladium’s ornate walls. Without the “voltage” of performing live, and grieving the death of her mother, the American singer-songwriter has said that she had depression in lockdown, eventually finding her way back via the rugged countryside of her adopted home of Cornwall. Realising she had to write her way out of the emotional fog, just as she had done on 1992’s uncompromising breakthrough Little Earthquakes, the ornate Ocean to Ocean started to take shape.

While this short UK tour is ostensibly in support of that album, her sixteenth, Amos is famous for her eclectic setlists peppered with fan favourites, B-sides and covers. Tonight is no different. After her ecstatic arrival in which she bows and mimes a wide group hug, she settles down between her giant Bösendorfer piano on one side and a bank of keyboards on the other. Head turned to face outwards, eyes peering inquisitively over the top of black-framed glasses, she joins her drummer and guitarist for the swirling Juárez, a song about the murder of hundreds of women taken from 1999’s electronic curio, To Venus and Back.

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by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Hinako Omori

The composer fuses Wiltshire field recordings with astral punk, drawing on the therapeutic Japanese practice of ‘forest bathing’

In a world beset by traumas, there has been a marked new age turn in music in recent years. The likes of Jenny Hval, Björk and Gang Gang Dance have made thoughtful use of therapeutic sounds while cleaving closer to this plane than ambient musical adventurers of yore. Even more so Yokohama-born, London-based composer and sound engineer Hinako Omori. Her debut album, A Journey…, is born of an immersive project created at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios for the 2020 lockdown version of the Womad festival, and is inspired by the 1980s Japanese therapy of shinrin-yoku, “forest bathing”, a walk in the woods as an exercise in awareness.

Field recordings from the Chew Valley, Mendip Hills and the Wiltshire fields near Real World become a solarpunk sci-fi soundtrack on the likes of Spaceship Lament, in which sparse, silvery hazes and hyperdrive arpeggios are lit by suddenly transfixing swoops of synth. Time becomes elastic in Will You Listen In; its soft blooms, swells of synth, interweaving whispers and soft cries are made for Pauline Oliveros-style deep attention. A word of warning, though, on the album’s “healing” frequencies and binaural beats: “As a disclaimer, I’d recommend not listening to the music while operating machinery,” Omori has said. “A relaxed environment would be better.”

A Journey… will be released on 18 March on Houndstooth. Hinako Omori will perform at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London, with the London Contemporary Orchestra on 19 March, 8pm

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by Emily Mackay via Electronic music | The Guardian

Yves Tumor review – a star-making statement of intent

Troxy, London
The genre-bending US singer-producer delivers a raw, kaleidoscopic show with the crowd-courting confidence of an artist on the verge of lift-off

The last time I saw Sean Bowie, AKA Yves Tumor, they were shirtless and writhing on stage, wreathed in dry ice. Their tall frame paced across a strobing backdrop as they belted out a lithe mix of experimental noise and nonchalant spoken word to a small, devoted moshpit of headbanging fans. The rest of us looked on, curious and somewhat bemused at this singular figure producing ear-splitting sounds as we waited for the main act, house producer Jacques Greene, to come on.

That was in 2017 at the Electric Brixton. Five years on, Yves Tumor is the defiant headliner, and that mini-moshpit of fans has turned into the entire room. Tonight’s show had been scheduled once more for Electric Brixton but was upgraded to the Troxy, which has double the capacity. A hushed buzz of anticipation sweeps round the art deco space before Bowie steps out in an orb of light in front of two vast plinths housing the band. They have ample reason to treat this show like a victory lap. It’s just one stop on a mammoth and largely sold-out US and European tour in support of the performer’s fourth LP, Heaven to a Tortured Mind (2020) and last year’s EP The Asymptotical World.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We see pop as a vehicle to say something’: meet club provocateurs Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul

The Ghent duo’s addictive songs bring playful humour to heavy topics. They talk friendship, signing with Soulwax and Belgian colonial atrocities

The backbone of Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s song Haha is the sound of Adigéry’s laughter spliced into a persistent refrain, a sound occasionally interjected with the phrase: “Guess you had to be there.” It’s as catchy as it is unsettling. The Ghent-based dance music duo want to make listeners dance – but they’re also not afraid of making them squirm with their pointed and drily funny politicised lyrics.

And yet, Adigéry was surprised when a white woman told them recently that she had been joyously dancing in her kitchen to another song, Blenda, until she realised they were singing about xenophobia (“Go back to your country where you belong,” Adigéry sings on the track) and suddenly felt uncomfortable. “I said maybe it’s not that bad that you knew you’d feel awkward,” says Adigéry. “[Maybe] that’s a new way to start empathising.”

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by Kadish Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer review – wildly eclectic electropop

(Deewee)
The Belgian duo’s debut album is a banging fusion of funk, house and techno that makes up for in mischievous energy what it lacks in subtle wit

Bangers that work the prefrontal cortex as much as the pelvis: that’s the manifesto for Belgian electropop duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul. Truth be told, they’re stronger on the hips than the quips. Their debut album, co-written and co-produced with Soulwax, is a treasure chest of funk, French house, sweaty techno and all kinds of dirty electronic weirdness to rival Moloko at their freakiest. But their takes on the fraught subject of wokeness on Esperanto (“Don’t say: I would like a black Americano/ Say: I’ll have an African American, please”), or sexual agency on the Timbaland-flavoured dark R&B of Reappropriate err on the side of basic.

The thumping, technoid Blenda, working out the tensions of immigrant heritage, and the rubberised-metal shimmy of It Hit Me, recounting the duo’s moments of sexual awakening, make a better fist of topicality. Their mischievous energy is toughest to resist on the cheeky Ceci N’est Pas Un Cliché, a string of overused lyrical phrases given marching orders over deeply infectious funky house, or Thank You, a pulsing, sarcastic up-yours to all us purveyors of unsolicited advice: “Couldn’t have done this without you and your opinion… Yes, I prefer my first EP too!”

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by Emily Mackay via Electronic music | The Guardian