‘Mount Elephant’ is organic psychedelia at its finest. These are drifting, pastoral meditations rooted in the “joy and rhythms” of Eastern music and one of the most precious luxuries of our time: doing things slowly. Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessio Ferarri’s third Upupuyāma record and first on Fuzz Club finds inspiration in traditional Bhutanese music, Thai disco and Anatolian psych, by way of the lysergic acid-folk, ‘70s kosmische and stoner-rock that has always coursed through the project – dream-like instrumentals always threatening to breakdown into blasts of fuzzed-out riffing.

“Mount Elephant was born out of a need to listen, to listen to silence”, Ferrari says: “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).