MU TATE - Life Of Mu

“Life Of Mu” marks the most intimate album yet from Artur Strekalov, an artist who has always drifted through the reverberations of the unconscious. The shift here isn't in the material but in the structure: a fragmentary diary made of impressions and in-the-moment sketches, brought to life by stories told by close friends, film samples, and a knack for sonic collage that feels more melodic and tactile here, less ethereal. The song lengths confirm as much: despite the range of genres on show, tracks run from barely a minute to just three, with only "Memory Of A Memory", carried by Ben Bondy's hazy guitar, stretching to the four-minute mark.

The reference points belong to a well-established scene: suburban smoky haze materializes into a retro-future with vaporwave leanings, but the samples feel plucked from a domestic imagination, somewhere between cloud rap and bedroom pop. Compared to previous chapters, where the pursuit of that attitude was driven by deliberate thought, spontaneity takes over here. The sound turns deliberately bare-bones, almost raw next to more polished efforts like 2023's "They're With You Always". And when refinement does surface, it's because the record knows exactly when to bring it out: as in the choice to stay rhythmic while rationing the drum machine, which only really appears on "I Lived So Carefully Thinking Someone Was Watching".

Strekalov goes straight at his uncertainties with real sensitivity, proving this was never a pose or a chase after whatever subculture happens to be trending: a result that shows up even in the song titles, like the closing "Those Who Died Yesterday Might Have Been Thinking About Tomorrow", a title heavy enough just to read, set to a melancholic, dreamy piano. Every corner of his vocabulary resurfaces here, alongside new sonic palettes: from the IDM drama of "World Of" to the torrential ambient of "Shedding Skin", all the way to something that nearly swallows shoegaze whole on "Heavyweight". Not everything holds together, and the record knows it, carrying more registers than it can fully manage. But it's precisely that excess that makes it honest.

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22/06/2026