About

Clio Em (Clio Montrey) is a composer, writer, singer, multi-instrumentalist and gamedev who weaves imaginary worlds. Her genre-defying works blur the borders between pop, classical, folktronica, and science fiction.

“The songs are very well written… intelligent and inspired… if you’re curious about what type of music a child of the 21st-century can create, follow her, step by step.”

– Maurice Du Berger, reviewing Gravity Wing for I Care if You Listen

Clio is a quintessential indie creator and often carries out every step of the musical creative process, from writing the music and text to sampling, recording, producing, and live performance.

She has brought her sci-fi folktronica sounds around the world, including shows at Schloss Laudon, Loop Vienna, and the Schlossmuseum Linz with Sofar Sounds, Comiccons Montréal and Ottawa, Brisbane’s 2High Festival 2016, and the Austrian E-Sports Festival. Clio has received numerous awards for her musical creation work, including several competitive composition grants from the Austrian Ministry of Arts and Culture, as well as the Alice and Betty Schultz Scholarship for her AIRSHIPS project from The Banff Centre. She is an alumna of McGill University, MUK (the Vienna Conservatory, and MDW (the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna).

As a performer, Clio has sung on many stages as well as for film, television, and games, on choirs for projects like Bear McCreary’s soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Takeshi Furukawa’s work for Avatar: The Last Airbender, and World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

Clio is the producer for award-winning indie title Dungeons of Hinterberg (Microbird Games, 2024). She is passionate about game worldbuilding and wrote the chapter Building Fantasy Worlds Through Music for the book The Magic of Games (Edition Donau-Universität Krems). She has presented on musical worldbuilding in games at various conferences, such as Coding Medieval Worlds (University of Vienna), Game Dev Days Graz (University of Graz), and CIVIS (International Conference on Video Games and Social Impact, Málaga). She was also on the research team of Barbara Lüneburg’s project TransCoding/What if?, a project about participatory art, based at the Kunstuni Graz (KUG).

As a member of the award winning Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Clio has sung concerts at venues ranging from the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg to the Vienna State Opera. Her opera chorus work on stage at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien includes a filmed production of Beethoven’s Fidelio (directed by Christoph Waltz) and work with renowned stage directors as Amélie Niermayer, Nikolaus Habjan, Calixto Bieito, Lotte de Beer, Andrea Breth, Torsten Fischer, Claus Guth, and Christof Loy, among others.

Clio’s portfolio can be found here: creative work

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