Mira Calix - Absent Origin (2LP)

Mira Calix’s Absent Origin lands like a flurry of paper cuttings on the studio floor, bright with colour and full of sharp edges. Released on Warp Records on 29 October 2021, it became her final album, which still gives it a bittersweet charge. She had already built a singular career folding classical instrumentation and sound art into adventurous electronics, and here she turns the idea of collage into a method, a mood, a thesis. The pieces are short, agile and deliberately ragged at the seams. You can hear scissors in the edits, glue in the crossfades, and the pleasure of rearranging the familiar into something bracingly new.

The concept is simple enough to grasp but rich in practice. During lockdown she made visual collages, then treated sound the same way, pulling from her archive, field recordings and snatches of voice. It is not a crate-digger’s exercise. It feels closer to studio theatre, where everyday objects and gestures become props and punctuation. She cuts between rhythms that never quite settle, lets a melody bloom then pulls it away, and sets acoustic textures against prickly electronics. There is humour in these jumps, and a serious sense of purpose too. Calix often talked about how all art is collage, how influence and memory layer over time. Absent Origin turns that idea into motion.

What makes it sing is her ear for contrast. A line of strings will flicker next to a clatter of percussion that sounds like it has been built from kitchen drawers. A voice, sometimes hers, sometimes treated beyond recognition, will rise like a thought then dissolve into a wash of reverb. Beats twitch rather than stomp. She moves fast, but never feels rushed. The tracks are compact enough that an image never outstays its welcome. It is the kind of sequencing that rewards repeat listens. You start to notice how one scrape of texture predicts the next, how the album’s many quick cuts form a larger shape.

Calix had spent years working with ensembles and in galleries, and the confidence from that world helps the album breathe. She is not afraid of silence or space. She lets acoustic instruments sit rough in the mix. There are passages that feel like chamber music heard through a cracked screen, other bits that lean toward the tactile, beat-driven Warp lineage she helped expand back in the early 2000s. The balance is delicate and humane. Nothing is showy for its own sake. Even the busiest collages feel guided by the hand of someone who knows when to step back.

Critics heard that clarity. The album drew strong praise for its cut-and-paste energy and for the way it reframed her decades of work into something fresh. Fans have since come back to it with added weight, knowing she died in 2022. Absent Origin doesn’t sound like a farewell, though. It sounds like an artist still experimenting, still playing with scale and texture, still unpicking how sound relates to touch and sight. That makes the record feel alive, which is the best tribute.

If you are tracking down Mira Calix vinyl, this is the one that tells the broadest story in the most compact way. The artwork folds the theme back on itself, and the pressing carries a crisp, lively stereo field that suits the quick moves. Absent Origin vinyl also makes sense as a gateway if you came to her through her earlier Warp releases and want something that speaks to the full scope of her practice. If you like to buy Mira Calix records online, you will see how often this title pops up in staff picks, and for good reason. It slots neatly next to classic cut-up records but sounds very much like its own world.

I first heard it on a rainy afternoon at a Melbourne record store, the kind of place that files installations next to IDM and doesn’t blink. One side in and someone asked what was playing. That is the effect. People lean in. For listeners in search of Mira Calix albums on vinyl, or anyone browsing vinyl records Australia wide who wants something that keeps rewarding curiosity, Absent Origin is a smart grab. It is a late-career leap that clarifies the whole arc of her work. She tears it up, rearranges it, and pins it to the wall so we can see the joins and admire the craft.