Suffolk, England resident Chantal Passamonte has been incorporating field recordings into pulsating, grimy beats since the mid-90s, when a prolific career spinning as DJ Chantal gave way to organic experiments off the dance floor. With each successive album on Warp, Mira Calix has migrated away from any discernible genre. She scraps familiar structure in favor of "conducting" live crickets, using rocks as percussion, and masterfully orchestrating strings, winds, and piano around such innovations. Eyes Set Against the Sun is not unlike Herbert's Score in its visually evocative mood-making.
The album is reverential to physicality, focusing on the organic rather than the theoretical. While the songs don't always confine themselves to the development-climax-denouement format, there's often a complex reworking of classical structures going on. With modern flair, Passamonte will stick with a line of melody for an unexpectedly long time: the pizzicato string section on "The Way You Are When", for instance, is a creepy filmic scene, but resists the added drama of counter-melodies and modifying twists. Instead, whispering vocals just barely enhance the pressurized tension of having the pizzicato riff repeated ad infinitum. Just under eleven minutes long, the song is epic without being overindulgent, and it turns out there is something of a backbone, a loop back to the soothing string legato of its opening minutes, much as a symphony might. At the close, a youthful choral section strives to reach emotive heights the song hadn't yet dared to. There's no discernible matrix enclosing the piece in precedent or audience expectation, and many of the songs seem to quietly thumb their nose at the human role even as they're dependent on it.
Passamonte's curious meanderings with water effects and lifelike instrumentation (string plucks, pulls, and scrapes) on "Because to Why" make for a dark scene. Along with two other tracks, this opener conveys the most explicit verbal messages on the album, the rest of the songs liberated in our imagination by minimal or nonexistent vocals. On "Why" and its follow-up "The Stockholm Syndrome", she juxtaposes what could be joyous lyrics with minor keys and blasts of Dr. Who synths. "Umbra/Penumbra" brings us a resolute piano melody, happier string loops, and skulking drum machines amid the words, "You make me feel like summer's never coming/ You make me feel like nothing's ever true." Exploring this contrast both pokes fun at the decisive, long-understood emotional meaning behind major and minor keys. Or, if we are to retain those old meanings, suggests how her words may be connoted positively.
Passamonte has performed alongside the London Sinfonietta and created soundscapes for art installations. As Mira Calix, she expresses her interest in crossing artistic endeavors with natural processes. Her effects borrow from nature, imitate it, and deferentially fuse it with man-made interpretation, as on "Belonging (No Longer Mix)", which draws on tribal music, dance halls, weather systems, wing-beats, and computers for a glaringly mechanized atmosphere that's still utterly free of human presence. Mira Calix hasn't exactly embraced lyricism, teetering between landscape soundtrack and songbook on many of her releases. Here, vocals take a definitive back seat-- when they do appear, it's as a ghostly, digitally fabricated instrument that inserts language into the broadly relatable wash of beautiful, scary, preliterate meaning. Passamonte's playful, deeply moving orchestration continually poses new questions about music's own language. Written English doesn't necessarily get in the way, but the voiceless material is a book without pictures that speaks volumes.
