April 9, 2003

By Peter Nicholson

ON THE OTHER side of the Atlantic, in the U.K., Chantal Passamonte, a.k.a. Mira Calix, is just ending her day while here I'm only beginning mine, but we seem to be on the same page. It's the first week of the war led by our respective governments, thousands are protesting in the streets, and people are dying in Iraq, but we're talking about music and insects. A bit incongruous without a doubt, yet Passamonte feels it's important to carry on as an artist and realizes life and art must go on, even in the face of atrocities, and she has no plans to cancel her upcoming U.S. appearances.

At the same time, it's clear she's a politically engaged individual, though her music is anything but agitprop, and on her new album, Skimskitta (Warp Records), the lyrics are barely discernible. "I'm not overtly political in my music ... but I think growing up in South Africa, it's very hard to be a politically ambivalent or unaware person," she says on the phone from East Anglia. "For me, a vote is not a God-given right, and it's the most precious thing you have, and you should use it."

Second nature

Passamonte's views on political process may be readily conveyed, but her approach to making music is somewhat more intangible and ephemeral. In describing how a song might come into being, she explains, "It literally can be something someone said to me or I overheard, or something's happened to me or someone I know, and I go into the studio without particularly realizing it, but that thought's been with me for days." This combination of the abstract and the personal is at the heart of Passamonte's music, a confluence of electronic manipulations and organic sources that is striking in its sparse beauty.

After moving to London in 1991, she ended up working at the record shop Ambient Soho and from there landed a job in P.R. at Warp, the label that has released all of her albums. Despite her extensive experience as a DJ (she even opened for Radiohead on their U.K. tour last year), Passamonte's studio work is far removed from the dance floor. Beats may appear, but chiefly as texture or counterpoint rather than as the unbending spine of a song designed for clubs.

In keeping with this, she finds many of her favorite sounds at the beach or in her garden, not at a bar or a sweaty warehouse.

With a cheekiness suited to Passamonte's decidedly nonhighbrow personality, one could call Skimskitta a "rock album" because it features many sounds produced by her collection of pebbles. Although electronics and nature might often be seen as being in opposition, Passamonte argues that they are perfectly suited for one another. "It's something that that technology allows you to do: to take very ordinary things and make them not necessarily extraordinary, but to present them in a fashion that actually makes them seem something 'other,' " she says. "And I think that's at the heart of electronic music."

Clicking with crickets

For a recent performance at London's Royal Festival Hall, Passamonte further blurred the lines between animal and mineral by enlisting the aid of live crickets for her piece "NuNu," a version of which was released by Warp as an EP. Originally commissioned by the Natural History Museum in Geneva, her 30-minute composition was constructed entirely from samples of insect noises the museum provided. For the version performed with the London Sinfonietta, Passamonte enlisted the string section to mimic insect noises using their bows and instrument bodies, while she worked loops from a laptop and sampled the crickets, which were miked center stage. "They performed wonderfully," she says with a chuckle.

While Passamonte's show in San Francisco may not be quite as ambitious, it also won't simply consist of loops from her laptop. "I'm bringing lots of effects units, and a little sampler, and a drum machine. My approach to doing it live is more like a dub mix," she says. "There's lots of processes, and you can mix it up so it doesn't sound the same every night, and there's loads of room for horrible accidents."

She also promises plenty of new material, though she confesses that live shows make her a bit more nervous than DJ gigs. "[When you're DJing], you've got a lot more freedom. When you're playing a live set, you're more restricted because there's only X amount of tracks that I can prepare to do live.... There is the fear factor – if everyone hates it, they really hate you." Still, Passamonte admits she would rather evoke a negative response than no response at all.

My own delight in Skimskitta has been steadily growing in strength with each repetition. It isn't an album I "play" – instead it's one to which I listen, hearing the dialogue between the plaintive, reflecting loops of "Poussou" and the reedy, telegraphing scratches of "Woody," the breathing, machine drones of "Clement," and the tentative, longing piano of "I may be over there (but my heart is over here)." In attempting to describe the recording, I find my own voice failing and turn to Passamonte herself: "Music is an amazing thing because it expresses things that words just can't."