“Life Of Mu” marks the most intimate album by Artur Strekalov, an author who has always fluctuated among the reverberations of the unconscious. The change of direction is not in the material, but in the structure: a fragmentary diary made of impressions and sketch of the moment, brought to life by the presence of stories told by close friends, cinematic champions and an attitude to collage sound which here becomes more melodic and material, less ethereal. This is also confirmed by the length of the songs: despite the genres covered, they range from a scant minute to just three minutes, with only “Memory Of A Memory”, accompanied by Ben Bondy's soft guitar, arriving at the fourth.
The references are those of a consolidated scene: the suburban smoky fog materializes in a retro-future with vaporwave sympathies, but the samples seem drawn from a domestic imagination, among cloud rap and bedroom pop. Compared to the previous chapters, where the desire to grasp that attitude was characterized by active thought, spontaneity prevails here. The sound becomes deliberately essential, almost raw compared to sophisticated episodes like “They're With You Always” from 2023. And if refinement emerges, it is because it knows when to bring it out: as in the choice to be rhythmic while sipping the use of drum machinesconcretely present only in “I Lived So Carefully Thinking Someone Was Watching”.
Strekalov arrives directly at his uncertainties with his sensitivity, demonstrating that it has never been a façade or the pursuit of the subculture of the moment: a result that is also found in the titles of the songs, as in the final “Those Who Died Yesterday Might Have Been Thinking About Tomorrow”, whose title weighs already just reading it, expressed in a melancholic and dreamy piano. All sorts of vocabulary from his repertoire are found, but also new sound palettes: from the Idm drama of “World Of” to the torrential ambient of “Shedding Skin”, up to almost devouring shoegaze with “Heavyweight”. Not everything holds together, and the record knows it, bringing with it more registers than it can manage. But it is precisely this excess that makes him honest.
06/22/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
