Manizeh to release debut album featuring and produced by Ganavya

London-based artist and spiritual teacher Manizeh Rimer, founder of the acclaimed Love Supreme Projects, has announced her highly anticipated debut album Mahku, to be released on December 5, 2025 via LEITER. The album marks a profound new chapter in Rimer’s creative journey, merging ancient chant traditions with contemporary spiritual jazz.

Mahku was co-produced by Rimer’s close collaborator ganavya, who released her celebrated albums Daughter of a Temple and Nilam earlier this year via LEITER. Recorded during the first half of 2025 at LEITER’s Funkhaus Studio in Berlin, the record brings together a remarkable ensemble of international musicians in an atmosphere of deep connection and improvisational freedom.

The first single “Ashem Vohu (feat. ganavya)” is available to download and stream now, offering an early glimpse into the album’s spiritual and emotional depth.

Mahku was born of a friendship established after Manizeh, whose Parsi family emigrated from South Asia to Europe during her childhood, had reached out to ganavya in the early days of Love Supreme Projects, which opened in 2022 in London as a place for students of ancient practices to gather and belong. She moved to London with her husband in 2002, their first date was a Pharoah Sanders concert beneath the Coit Tower in San Francisco in 1998, where she was the first person to bring Jivamukti Yoga to the UK. Practitioners like Sting, Madonna, Krishna Das, or Jai Uttal would gather in her centre.

Manizeh’s practice of chanting far predates the popularity it enjoys today. During the earliest days of lockdown, Manizeh started holding Sunday morning online sessions that a remarkable number of people joined. “Sitting and meditating is really difficult,” she explains. “Moving your body is an important piece of it. You have a body, so you have to look after it. But chanting was a direct hit. It shuts the mind down and opens the heart very quickly. The reason people drink and take drugs is that they’re looking for a shortcut to that experience. For me, chanting was that shortcut.”

Although Mahku encapsulates the transcendent magic of this simple but life-altering practice, it’s far more than a spiritual aid. For starters, it features a stellar cast of top musicians, gathered by ganavya, who, Manizeh says, “brings a village together like nobody else.” Present are Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist Jai Uttal (her longtime teacher); double bassists Ben Hazleton (a staple of the London jazz scene) and New York’s Doug Weiss (collaborator of Al Foster and Brian Blade); harpist Miriam Adefris (who’s worked with Floating Points and ganavya); rising star pianist Jay Verma (who has worked with ganavya, Cleo Sol, and Olivia Dean among others); and perhaps most preciously, Manizeh’s teenage daughter, Mahku Rimer on voice and guitar.

The debut album makhu (which means ‚eclipse‘ in parsi) encapsultes the practice of Jivamukti Yoga, which is a chanting practice shutting the mind down, and opening the heart very quickly. Manizeh is the first person who’s brought this practice to the UK via her Love Supreme projects and counts Madonna or Sting among their students. It also features incredible musicianship

Significantly, Manizeh points out, Mahku means ‘eclipse’. “It’s like the sun and moon coming together, right and left coming together, differences coming together, and then you just see the one.” But, perhaps more importantly, it’s the name of her grandmother, too, whom she describes as “an embodiment of unconditional love. I had such strong, emotional memories of Mahku Granny that I named my daughter after her. Chanting connects humans through space and time. If we think about how we are still singing chants that have been sung for thousands of years, we are part of a loop that is constantly going. We can plug into it and get all that energy, we can dial up the volume or dial it down, but it’s always been there for humanity.” Manizeh ferries the past into the future, grandmother to daughter, Mahku to Mahku.

This ‘loop’ is evident in the album’s first and last tracks. Mahku opens with a 3,000-year-old Zoroastrian prayer ‘Ashem Vohu’, sung in Avestan by Manizeh, her daughter Mahku, and ganavya, learned as a child from her grandmother. “This might be the first time women are singing it, let alone recording it this way,” Manizeh reflects quietly. The album concludes, meanwhile, with her own teenage daughter leading the intimate ‘Landslide Sri Ma’, a reworking of Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 classic track. As Manizeh marvels, “The album connects space and time and generations.”

Within this unified sphere are six further tracks, among them the hushed peace of the Tibetan ‘Bhaisajyaguru’ (to which LEITER’s own co-founder Grimm joined on voice after learning during the session that his teacher, who had taught him a version of this chant, had peacefully passed away while Manizeh was recording it) and the fluid, radiant ‘Narayana’ (on which Jay Verma improvises), as well as the peaceful Buddhist mantra ‘Gate Gate Paragate’ and Sanskrit prayer ‘Asato Ma’ (both featuring ganavya). Manizeh and Jai Uttal also reinterpret the Hindu devotional mantra ‘Tvam Eva’ while ‘Avan’s Sita Ram’, dedicated to Manizeh’s mother Avabai, once travelled across space and oceans as Manizeh sang the song daily in San Francisco to her dying mother in Geneva. Now, it travels across time and generations as Mahku Rimer carries the song to its delicate ending.

When asked about the central friendship that formed this album, Manizeh tells us that through mutual friends, Manizeh had learnt that ganavya had unexpectedly sold out three dates within seconds, with the venue unable to add a fourth date. Instinctively, Manizeh wrote to ganavya, offering her Love Supreme Projects as a space to hold the fourth concert, and within minutes on the phone the two were bonding over Alice Coltrane and the principle of love. Though she was intensely touring, playing over 100 shows a year, ganavya kept returning to Love Supreme Projects to play shows, citing an unparalleled sense of tenderness and community. “That’s how we became so close” Manizeh says. “Both her and Felix said to me one day, ’You need to record.’ I said, ‘I have no idea how to do that.’ She said, ‘Well, we can do it together.”

Although Manizeh’s work, especially after the birth of Love Supreme Projects, has often led people to enquire if she had recordings of her music, she’d never considered making an album. If she had any doubts on recording, however – even after regularly joining ganavya on stages like Union Chapel and the Barbican – they were worked through with care and love at LEITER’s Berlin studio. “It’s like Narnia,” she laughs. “You walk into this huge complex that is dilapidated and freezing, then you go through this one wooden door, and you’re in a completely different world. There are no windows. You have no idea what time it is. You have no idea how much of the day has gone by. It allows you to focus completely, suspending you in an infinite river of time.”

This river of timelessness flows in Mahku, making it a collaboration for the ages. If, Love Supreme Project’s north star is, as Manizeh regularly is known to reiterate, to help people “crack your heart open”, then she’s just provided its ideal musical equivalent. It is a sophisticated debut album, but perhaps this was only to be expected. “Before we began,” Manizeh recalls fondly, “I asked ganavya if perhaps we couldn’t have had some stepping stones on the way?“ She replied, “No, you’re ready.” It would seem that she was right.

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