Upupayāma (the moniker of Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessio Ferrari) is today releasing ’Fil Dağı’, the second single to be lifted from his incoming third album ‘Mount Elephant’ out September 13th on Fuzz Club.
Arriving following the psychedelic Thai disco groove of recent lead single ‘Moon Needs The Owl Pt. 1’, ‘Fil Dağı’ (‘Elephant Mountain’ in Turkish) taps into Upupayāma’s Anatolian influences, expanding on a song that first appeared on his 2020 self-titled debut. Ferrari says of the track: “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.”
On the newly-announced album, he adds: “Mount Elephant was born out of a need to listen. 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.”
Thoughts Words Action 