22 September 2024

UPUPAYAMA – Mount Elephant (2024, LP Fuzz Club Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Fuzz Club Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, 180gr, Gold Nugget Vinyl, Handnumbered, 500 copies

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, 140gr, White Marble Vinyl

Release Date: 13 Sep 2024

Of course, all of you readers of “TimeMaZine” and listeners of ‘The TimeMachine Radio Show” are familiar with Upupuyāma, Alessio Ferarri’s one-man PSYCHEDELIC project. “Mount Elephant” is his 3rd album launching a collaboration with a new label, Fuzz Club Records. I will cut all necessary/unnecessary information (you can find everything you need here: Upupuyāma LP (Check Review), The Golden Pond LP (Check Review), Upupuyāma (Check Interview w/ Alessio) and go straight to the point, straight to the album.

“Mount Elephant” consists of just 6 songs equally divided to the 2 sides of the LP album. The album starts in a psychedelic acoustically trippy folkie way with “Moon Needs The Wolf” (Alessio: 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), a track that is deeply inspired by the Middle East and surely it sounds (musically and vocally) like a lost Psychedelic gem by the modern Psych Masters of the Land of the Rising Sun, Kikagaku Moyo, acoustic guitars blend with flutes and sitar, under a hallucinogenic environment with trippy percussion, creating an amalgam of modern age Hippie Psychedelia, sooner the whole scenery will be transformed into a Krauty Groove-a-delicious “thing” with a fascinating Jungle-ish rhythm, it feels like trying to come into a Trance State of Mind, while towards the end the percussion battles on with a hot shimmering a-la Santana electric guitar, ending this musical journey in awe! “Thimpu” is mystical, dark, and trippy, there’s a huge colorful Psychedelic Middle Eastern environment and Alessio creates a magical mind blowing improvisational Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (got it?), a rather powerful drumming leads the track while the electric guitar colorizes the air, ending in an intense Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii atmosphere (“Thimpu” was written whilst Alessio 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”)… Side ‘A’ closes with “Fil Dağı” (“Elephant Mountain” in Turkish, a song that taps into the project’s Anatolian influences, expanding on a song that first appeared on Alessio’s 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”), a trippy ecstatic trance-y dance-y magnificent rhythm, Middle Eastern inspired (of course), with a hot electric guitar sound that blinks an eye to Tinariwen, resulting a unique phantasmagoric combination of sounds! Side ‘B’ opens with “Moon Needs The Owl” and Alessio describes the atmosphere of the song in the best possible way: “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”, a majestic Groove-a-delic Psych danceable Anthem, diving (literally) after the 5th minute into a Psychedelic intoxicated sea of liqueur, the Mind Expands, the Body Surrenders, the Soul Escapes, while a Psychedelic Delirium keeps on burning vital brain cells… Wow! “Dabadaba” (Alessio: 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), is a pastoral organic trippy interlude, a let loose and kind of acid folkie tune, it feels like the Great Shaman calls out all believers to that nocturnal ceremony… The album, the Journey, comes to an end with the self-titled “Mount Elephant” (Alessio: 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), this is Trippy and Meditative acoustic Lysergic Psychedelia with an enchanted Middle Eastern Folkie Flute sound under slow Shamanic drumming, slowly a super Fuzzy electric guitar enters and fills the atmosphere with sweet Lysergic Acid, the scenery becomes wild and sonically noisy, trying to wake up the last hypnotized cell of your brain… Fuck… I want more… Superior Transcendental Psychedelia for the Mind, the Body, and the Soul… Invest! One of the BEST albums of 2024… TimeLord Michalis