‘absent origin’ reassembles and reimagines recordings and musical scores composed by Mira Calix, globally, over the past decade. It’s a collage album about edges and borders, cutting and tearing, and composing new combinations that point to an audio visual manifesto for the 21st Century.

“Like Duchamp, I had started out wanting to make an album, or box, of approximately all the things I produced. In the end, I realised – as much as a collage is the coupling of two or more realities, it also offers the means to examine the materials and culture of an era, questioning and expanding its borders.” – Mira Calix

Every song on the album was created by applying a different collage process relating to a different visual artist, spanning the history of collage to contemporaries of the practice. The sonic materials are subjected to a myriad of processes; layered, synthesised, constructed and assembled into electronic melodies, textures and complex, frisky dance rhythms that are constantly shifting in surprising ways. absent origin employs collage to make sense of the current moment of displaced voices, disjunction and political unrest.

Calix’s recording sessions from all over the world are the many fragments we hear across the album; from India to Tasmania, Jordan to Belgium, China to Uganda, her former home of South Africa, to her current home in Britain. Slicing into these are further recordings of vocalists, percussionists, choirs, orchestras, quartets and soloists, never appearing in the form in which they were originally intended. The record is a polyphony of predominantly diverse female voices held together by pulsating baselines, haunting electronic sounds and orchestrated melodies and with them, we travel.

The album fizzes with a political energy and the interconnectedness of everything. At this moment in time, there is an impossibility of separating one thing from another; the effect is strange and not exactly reassuring. Collage suggests infinite possibilities and each track here is a singularly unique compositional combine, a dizzying hall of mirrors with its own unlikely harmony, its own distinctive rhythm. On ‘absent origin’, collage becomes the tool to make sense of a present that is often anything but.