Hannah Macklin - Mu

What’s Mu about?Mu is about everything: Songs about heartbreak and parting share the album with songs marveling at the scale of the universe.

Mu is a concept from Zen and Chan Buddhism that means: “nothingness” and also, “pure awareness.” The awareness at the source of all things. In Hannah’s words: “There is so much life in every moment. Endless patterns, algorithms and instances repeating and changing and adapting. Spiraling outwards from the source. What source? The source.” In search of the source, Hannah has composed and arranged an undefinable, cinematic album that leads the listener on a winding path through her imagination.

Sonically as well as thematically, Mu is an album of extremes and lofty ambitions. Fragile and delicate vocal and violin textures contrast with crunchy noisescapes and brooding synthesizers. Hannah’s commanding voice shares the spotlight with a string section and is backed by spacious production featuring many acoustic instruments.

Producer Nick Herrera has brought a reassuring chunkiness to this unplugged palette, in particular the head nodding drums that anchor Hannah’s celestial musings . Like a !lm soundtrack or a symphony Mu is best listened to and understood as a whole - it circles back to themes and refrains and re-examines them. Sometimes a song is a song, sometimes it’s a soundscape dreaming of a song.

“When making this album, I had a specific concept for how I wanted the music to sound. I don’t mean in terms of genre... it was more of a visceral, sensory concept which I knew I could only realise by allowing myself to experiment and create simultaneously, believing in my rough ideas enough to grow them, to weave them into stories. I began allowing myself to enter and remain in a very heightened state of awareness, which is a state I have continued to pursue and learnt to enjoy ever since. I let my mind dissolve into blackness each day. From there the most wonderful colours can appear. I have decided to call the album “Mu” to signify the empty chasm I allowed to hold within me whilst these songs were born.”