Upupayāma's third studio album 'Mount Elephant' is out now!
Upupayāma's new album 'Mount Elephant' is out today! Rooted in the joy and rhythms of Eastern music and the luxury of doing things slowly, the third LP from the Italian project finds inspiration in traditional Bhutanese music, Thai disco and Anatolian psych, by way of lysergic acid-folk, ‘70s kosmische and stoner-rock. You can stream and pick up your copy of the album on white marble vinyl here
Of the album, Upupayāma's Alessio Ferarri writes: “Mount Elephant was born out of a need to listen, to listen to silence. 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.”
