Upupayāma – Track by Track
Upupayāma is Alessio Ferrari, resident of a small mountain village in the Apennine mountains in Italy. Upupayāma’s self-titled debut is really an impressive feat – Alessio plays every instrument himself and the sound is as sophisticated and psychedelic as you’d expect from more seasoned loner psych players, with intricate musicianship, imaginative storytelling, invented languages, and field recordings, recorded in an old barn.
Alessio describes his sound as “Kikagaku Moyo drinking tea in an Italian forest discussing Träd Gräs Och Stenar with an elf while he plays a flute,” which is apt. Mixed and mastered by Yui Kimijimai (recording engineer to Kikagaku Moyo, Sundays & Cybele) in Tokyo, who Alessio had long admired and wrote to quite optimistically before quickly receiving an affirmative response that yes, they’d be interested in mixing and mastering the album. Alessio describes each of the EP’s four tracks below.
White Oak
It talks about a svāmin (swamy) (he doesn’t know to be a swamy) made of grass. He has walked a lot, he dozed off under a tree, a white oak, and so it begins his dream. It doesn’t have a particular meaning, it’s just something that often happens to me during my walks in the woods: sit under a tree and look around, close my eyes and smell the scents, listen to the noises around me. This is the only song sung in English, although it has few words: “I am the leafy swamy under the moody White Oak” goes something like this. I think it has its irony, a spiritual teacher made of grass unaware that he is a spiritual teacher walks in the woods, falls asleep and dreams. I don’t know, I like to think of it as a story halfway between “Alice in Wonderland” and the numerous legends about wood elves that rule here where I live, in the Apennines of northern Italy.
Green Cabana
This song was inspired by a daydream I had. I consider myself a very normal person, but I often daydream. The dream consisted of a family gathered at night around their tent, after dinner the fire rises due to the wind and the whole family begins to dance around the bonfire. They dance non-stop, in a trance. The title is something I love to do often, to make a melting pot with languages … and then “Cabana” is a beautiful, musical, mysterious word.
The Blue Magician’s Fantasy
The blue magician is actually one of those characters who showed up in one of my daydreams. I had this image of a TV series that never existed from the 70s: a doctor / scientist / researcher spends his evenings experimenting with chemistry … and here it ends. I just have a picture of a blue magician in a smock. I’m sorry, I know he doesn’t make the slightest sense hahahaha.”
As for his fantasy, we can find out together: I know that this doctor / scientist / researcher has an inordinate passion for the color blue in all its shades, I could say that he is obsessed with it. I would like to ask a listener if he sees a continuation of the story and, if so, what he sees. I really like the songs that remain open, which leave the listener to conclude it with what he sees. Sounds like an excuse, but that’s it, I swear.
Precisely because it is the only song of the EP where I would be curious to know what others see, it is also the only song that does not have a well-defined landscape, characters and story. It is the most abstract song of the EP, in fact originally it was totally different from how it is now.
Hello Green Man, I Am a Tiger
It is sung in an invented language. I could talk for hours to explain why, apart from White Oak, I use an invented language, but I don’t want to bore anyone: I like to use the voice as a musical instrument rather than as a means to convey precise messages. I don’t feel like a bearer of any message, I just want the listener to feel good, to relax, get excited, to be able to use these sounds to talk to the trees…
Upupayāma, means “Mountain Hoopoe”, which is surreal because the hoopoe is not a mountain bird. I like the fact that a mountain hoopoe and an invented language can live in an imaginative world.
The music of Upupayāma is inextricable from nature, the sound of the mountains, the forests, the woods, the culmination of Alessio’s wandering and dreaming; a manifestation of a mythical world where contradictions and colors can coexist.
