Description:
Amanda Mur – Neu Om (2025)
Review:
The most interesting electronic music of modern times often isn’t that which seeks to clean the slate, but which in some way engages with older musical and cultural traditions with the intent of bringing something new into being. Here’s a piece of evidence to support that hypothesis: Neu Om, the debut album from Amanda Mur. Mur is a pianist, vocalist, and producer from Cantabria, Spain. She has a background in classical composition and performance, but the music she explores here is new territory for her. Across Neu Om’s nine tracks, Mur draws on influences with few obvious formal links — fado and cumbia; classical piano and Gregorian chant; folk music and jolts of clubby sub-bass — before binding them together through a conceptual vision shaped by Tantric traditions and the mystic philosophies of Hildegard von Bingen. That these disparate elements cohere pretty much seamlessly is a testament to Mur’s burgeoning production skills. Assisted by the Madrid-based composer and sound designer Adrian Foulkes, and perhaps more unexpectedly, the British grime producer Joker, who provides additional mixing and mastering touches. Working together, the three have created a rich and distinctive sound world, flush with organic instrumentation, elegantly sculpted electronics, and levitating at the center of it all, Mur’s billowing, operatic voice. Like fellow experimentalists Lucrecia Dalt or Juana Molina, Mur’s songs combine the intellectual, the mystical, and the erotic. Opening track “Maithuna”—titled after a Sanskrit word for Tantric sexual union—is a heady reverie of vocal chants and fluttering rhythms that casts orgasm as an act of liberation. Elsewhere, Neu Om mines a rich seam of melancholy, while “Vapah” draws on the mournful language of fado to explore the emotions of unwanted pregnancy. “Canto A Los Migrantes,” meanwhile, explores the isolation of the migrant experience, filling in the narrative blanks with stirring string drones and urgent, stop-start rhythms; simultaneously a lament to the pain of leaving one’s homeland, and a tribute to those who dare make the journey. In abandoning familiar methodologies in favor of the unknown right from the get-go, Mur is starting her career on a risky note. But in risk lies reward, and that’s a lesson that resonates across Neu Om—its personal and artistic liberation so widely felt, it’s downright intoxicating. — daily.bandcamp.com
Track List:
01 - Maithuna
02 - Pandemic
03 - Canto a los migrantes
04 - Interludio 1
05 - Mutante
06 - Interludio 2
07 - Vapah
08 - Péndulo que baila
09 - Neu Om
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, experimental
Origin: Madrid, Spain 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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