Press Releases

Mira Calix has been awarded a £25k grant for the arts for a new project: Exchange And Return.

4th Oct 2009

Electronic musician Mira Calix, who is signed to Warp Records, is being supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council England to develop her skills by exploring and creating new links between electronic music and classical orchestration. The project; Exchange And Return, will see her working in partnership with Larry Goves and Tansy Davies, both celebrated composers in the field of British contemporary classical music.

Exchange And Return is a year- long project that has been devised by Mira and her main collaborator Larry Goves. They will create seven new pieces for electronics and acoustic instruments. This will also include a ten-minute piece created by Mira and Tansy Davies. At the end of the process they will record the new works as an album and tour the new material. Coming from very different musical backgrounds but with similar appetites for breaking down artistic barriers, the composers and musicians involved will gain creatively from the experience by learning about each other’s artistic practice. There is common aesthetic and philosophical ground between them but there is much to learn from their differences in terms of applying technology and their different means of creating music.

Mira and Larry will begin the process by exchanging existing musical material specific to their own disciplines and then reworking this to create new pieces. Through a process of discussing their working methods, sharing skills and setting each other assignments they will blur the boundaries between each other’s approaches and work. The project includes residency time and detailed work with a variety of instrumentalists to compliment the experiments in swapping working methods. This will lead to an evolution of exchanging and returning material that breaks down the boundaries between their two backgrounds and compositional perspectives. The aim of the project is to open up new directions for creative thought for all those involved.

Exchange And Return is generously supported by Aldeburgh Music, where the majority of the residencies and recording will take place. Opera North, Warp Records and others have contributed to a further £4000 in match funding. Mira Calix has been awarded a Grant for the Arts as part of the Escalator programme. Escalator is the pioneering talent plan from Arts Council England, East that finds, supports and invests in the best artistic talent across all art-forms throughout the East of England

Mira Calix says:

This is a real opportunity for me to study, at close quarters, the machinery of instruments. It’s a chance to see music from many different angles and incorporate the classic into my own more homegrown approach. I’m always looking for ways to expand the possibilities of my music and I have no doubt that working with Larry, he will present me with abundance.

Larry Goves says

Exchange And Return is about discovering the extent of the similarities and differences between mine and Mira Calix’s music to develop our methods and make new exciting sounds. I’m looking forward to learning about her approach to writing and performing. It’s a rare chance to expand and potentially transform my music in the close company of a sympathetic ear.

Mira Calix:

Mira Calix has released five albums and is signed to Warp Records. Her earlier music is almost exclusively electronic in nature, however, since 2003 she has incorporated orchestration and classical instruments into her work for installation pieces, film soundtracks and theatre. Mira has been commissioned to write pieces for the London Sinfonietta, the Aldeburgh Festival, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Opera North and The Manchester International Festival amongst others. 'My Secret Heart' her collaboration with British video artists Flate-E and sound designer David Sheppard, features a 100 strong choir and cellist Oliver Coates. The piece, commissioned by Streetwise Opera, premiered last year at the Royal Festival Hall in London and was the recipient of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. It continues to tour worldwide during 09/10. |Earlier this year she created the soundtrack to 'Chorus' and installation by United Visual Artists, commissioned by Opera North to celebrate the opening of the Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds. Mira Calix has recently collaborated with Scottish singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton (ex Arab Strap) for a Late Junction session on BBC radio 3.

Larry Goves: Larry Goves is a composer and performer based in the UK. His music has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, the Nash Ensemble, Sarah Nicolls, the BBC Philharmonic, Psappha, Ixion, The Hallé, 175 East, The Continuum Ensemble, Oliver Coates and many others all over the UK and abroad, He has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and New Zealand’s Concert FM and had pieces released on NMC, Dutton Epoch and the London Sinfonietta’s Jerwood Series. He founded, writes for and performs electronics with the experimental music group the house of bedlam. They have performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Faster than Sound 2008, the Purcell Room, non classical at Hoxton’s Macbeth and in the Aldeburgh Festival. He currently teaches composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and at Royal Holloway University.

Tansy Davies: Tansy Davies rose to prominence on the British scene with a sequence of ensemble works for the Composers Ensemble (Patterning), the London Sinfonietta (Torsion) and The Brunel Ensemble (The Void in this Colour), all of which bear the hallmarks of her apprenticeship under Simon Bainbridge and Simon Holt. In her recent work, Davies has found an accommodation between the worlds of the avant-garde and experimental rock, between - in the words of one critic - Xenakis and Prince.In 2005 the BBC SSO commissioned the trumpet concerto: Spiral House, and in 2006, the BBC SO and Zsolt Nagy performed (and recorded for broadcast) the orchestral work Tilting. In 2007 the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Thomas Adès gave the premiere of a 20-minute commission for large ensemble, Falling Angel, in Birmingham and at the Présences festival in Paris. Other recent commissions include works for the Britten Sinfonia, the CBSO Youth Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, and the Norwegian ensemble BIT 20. In 2008 a new orchestral work, Rift, was commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra and was recorded for Radio 3´s Discovering Music, for a programme featuring the music of Tansy Davies. Current projects include a work for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which will be premiered at the Proms in 2010.