Upupayāma

For those that were scouring the right corners of psychedelia last year, the debut from Upupayāma came as something of a welcome surprise. A solo outing from Italian songwriter Alessio Ferrari, the band’s mix of Eastern psychedelia and German Progressive’s more pastoral nodes slid them in easily alongside records from Kikagaku Moyo, Dungen, Goat, and Wax Machine. Like those bands Ferrari wraps his psychedelic sojourns in psych-folk mists with propulsive undertones, adding haunted flutes and a warm thrum of sitar to his bedrock of mossy guitars and humid ambience. Ferrari goes a touch further than the others in courting the fantastical, though, continuing his use of invented language on The Golden Pond. The technique, like his forbears in Magma, creates a record that relies on the sound and tone of language more than meaning to evoke a response.

As someone steeped in Japanese psych from the ‘70s, I’ve long jettisoned meaning from the mood in listening to these kinds of psychedelic records, and the effect here is quite similar. It’s not important what Ferrari is saying, but how he he packs the delivery with scarred emotion. The record, like its predecessor winds up like a lost artifact, a Voyager disc from a civilization yet uncharted. The record loses itself within the crumbling walls of forest psych, creating a soundtrack to fraught journeys — the soaring, Morricone meets Ghost headswim of “Sata Me Pani,” the slow pan across Träd, Gräs territory on “El Sueño de la Curandera.” Ferrari’s absorption and shuffling of his influences goes a long way on The Golden Pond, crafting a release that’s just as engrossing and adventurous as his debut.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.