Mira Calix
Eyes Set Against the Sun (Warp)
Electronica  Experimental 
On Eyes Set Against The Sun, Mira Calix makes electronic music that breathes. Folk music fashioned from broken beats and field recordings. Technologically-advanced songs with the misshapen bits kept in. Electronic music built using knackered bits of wood. 'I'm heavily influenced by my surroundings,� she says of the semi-wilderness in which she lives. �Wooden instruments breathe � even if it's an old Korg! If you record some trees or knock two branches together, there�s something in that. Oxygen or something. That might appear completely contrary to the technology I use. But that makes it more important to me bring that in.� For example the song Protean, the pastoral melody she came up with first suggested �a landscape, ' she says, ' but not one that I knew. A place that I'd never been. So she took herself and some of her kit off into the forest near her house in Suffolk. Some hours later she returned to her home studio.' I let most of the audio file run,' she says. But as well as beautiful birdsong, there's lots of rustling where I'm walking through the woods,' she laughs. She kept these in, you can hear the birds; and if you can�t hear the trees you can certainly hear the atmosphere. You can also, if you listen carefully, hear the rustling of leg on leaf. 'Most people would chop that stuff out but I actually really like it. It adds to that live-ness. Which I really try and pull into my work, which is why I play all the notes rather than programme it.' Calix is keen on such 'errors'. So much so that I add more'. That way, 'it sounds more real. I like dirt. It's not just sonic dryness.� Similarly, the silences between and within songs matter. And the pauses in titles matter: she says, with the album pronunciation, it's Eyes Set [three beats/three spaces] Against The Sun.

It all adds up to create a living, particular whole which pervades the album with a very original feeling, and an exploratory sensibility that is wide enough to encompass a children's choir, African thumb pianos and orchestral strings to create something that's quite exceptional and will grow on you like moss on a tree in those woods she recorded it in.