The beats don't formally appear until track three, 'Woody', and they quickly skitter and dribble away like mercury as the gongs resonate, her low-mixed voice drifting in and out of consciousness. See Appendix A for a verbatim rundown of what Calix calls All my arty blah blah (grammar and punctuation, composers own).Īnd see also the mini-album 3 Commissions (2004) for an elegant round-up of some of these works.Skimskitta opens with some e-bowed guitar and glitch noise, before moving into the unadorned piano and rasping breaths of 'Poussou'. That might appear completely contrary to the technology I use. Wooden instruments breathe even if its an old Korg If you record some trees or knock two branches together, theres something in that. I hate to use that word organic, she sighs reluctantly, in fact only using it because I made her.īut Im heavily influenced by my surroundings, she says of the semi-wilderness in which she lives. Music thats fun for children not just the ones who appear singing on it and grown-ups too.

You might call it avant-garde, but its meant to make you smile, not frown its heart-warm, not ice-cool. Technologically-advanced soundscapes with the knobbly, wobbly bits kept in. She makes electronic music that breathes like an orchestra breathes. Which I really try and pull into my work, which is why I play all the notes rather than programme it.Īnd the pauses in titles matter: she says, with the album pronunciation, its Eyes Set three beatsthree spaces Against The Sun.

Most people would chop that stuff out but I actually really like it. You can also, if you listen carefully, hear the rustling of leg on leaf. She kept these in Protean, which ended up a 157-second bucolic symphony. So she took herself and some of her electronic kit off into the forest near her house in Suffolk.īut as well as a beautiful cacophony of birdsong, theres lots of rustling where Im walking through the woods, she laughs.

The melody came to her first, and it suggested a pastoral feeling.Īs it often does with this boundary-blurring, backwards-forwards songwriter, this feeling in turn conjured an image in her minds eye a landscape, she says, but not one that I knew. Shes working on a track for her new album, Eyes Set Against The Sun.

Mira calix skimskitta rar extractor