Mount Elephant by Upupayāma

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‘Mount Elephant’ is organic psychedelia at its finest. These are drifting, pastoral meditations rooted in the “joy and rhythms” of Eastern music and one of the most precious luxuries of our time: doing things slowly. Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessio Ferarri’s third Upupuyāma record and first on Fuzz Club finds inspiration in traditional Bhutanese music, Thai disco and Anatolian psych, by way of the lysergic acid-folk, ‘70s kosmische and stoner-rock that has always coursed through the project – dream-like instrumentals always threatening to breakdown into blasts of fuzzed-out riffing.

“Mount Elephant was born out of a need to listen, to listen to silence”, Ferrari says: “Listening to the silence while observing flowers, while moving your hands in the wind, listening to your body while you are dancing. If in my first album (Upupayāma) I had travelled the length and breadth of a place, in the second (The Golden Pond) I had reached one and stopped there, in this third album I set out again, crossing a border and entering a long-dreamed place that I could finally ‘see with my own eyes’.”

A six-piece band live, where things take a more ever-evolving improvisation-based approach, on the recordings Ferrari writes, plays and records everything himself – guitars, keys, flute, sitar, erhu and an arsenal of percussion all feature. The recordings were laid down over time in Ferrari's home barn studio in a small mountain village overlooking the city of Parma, before being mixed by Chris Smith at Kluster Sounds (Kikagaku Moyo, Wax Machine).

“Musically speaking, I find it a paradoxical record because, although it uses a lot more fuzz than the previous albums, I find it a more relaxed record with more rhythm. I used a lot more percussion than before – such as congas, bongos, and cowbells – and I use them in a freer, more playful way. I can't stand it when people say ‘it's a more mature record etc’, I don't find any sense in it, it seems like we are on this planet to ripen like apples or tomatoes. On the contrary, I think that Mount Elephant is a much more childish album than the first two and I am very proud of that.”

‘Moon Needs the Wolf’ opens the album with the sort of musical journey that shapes many of the songs on the album, starting out in a soft psych-folk setting stripped back to just acoustic guitar, sitar and flute: “This song came to me one night with the acoustic guitar in the woods, remembering when, during the lockdown, I could hear the wolves howling in the woods near home.” For all that the song starts out on a hushed footing, though, soon a lively, wah-riding motorik groove kicks in that takes the song to almost dancey heights before eventually breaking down in a disorientating clash of blown-out soloing and scattered percussion.

The soaring ‘Thimpu’ was written whilst Ferrare went down a rabbit hole of seeking out obscure traditional Bhutanese music. “I would love to visit Bhutan one day and this song is one way to imagine myself there. ‘Thimpu’ is the mispronounced name of the capital, which would be Thimphu.” Elsewhere ‘Fil Dağı’ (‘Elephant Mountain’ in Turkish) taps into the project’s Anatolian influences, expanding on a song that first appeared on his 2020 debut: “I like to think of this song as a Green Cabana II. I often find myself imagining people dancing to our songs around a fire in the middle of nature and this one makes me think about it the most.”

Then there is the sprawling, 10-minute ‘Moon Needs The Owl’, a psychedelic world-disco groove that uplifts in its first half before slowly fading out in a sublime, winding haze as all good parties should: “This song is set in a Thai disco in the 70s with all these people smashing things (I recorded myself smashing empty wine bottles), messing around having fun and laughing, then the night gives way to dawn and everyone walks home.”

Following the atmospheric interlude ‘Dabadaba’ (“I wanted to play around with the flute and this huge shamanic drum with a sound so low that it makes your stomach vibrate every time you hit it”), the album closes out with title-track ‘Mount Elephant’. A song which perhaps perfectly captures the odyssey-like quality of this record: sublime tranquillity descending into a heads-down wig-out of epic proportions: “The first part of this song is a meditation on this endless mountain called Mount Elephant that cannot be found on any map. The second part is a fuzz bath that live, in our intentions, should blow the amplifiers.”

Music from the barn