Mamuthones - Behind the Mask

The Mamuthones of former Jennifer Gentle member Alessio Gastaldello are one of the leading acts of Italian occult psychedelia. While we wait for their new work, we caught up with them for an interview.

Alessio, let's start with this: who's currently in the band?

Right now the band is made up of me (synth/vocals/percussion), Matteo Polato (guitar) and Francesco Lovison (synth bass) from the Padua-based band Slumberwood, who have two excellent albums to their name and appear on the compilation "Our Lady of Darkness", and Andrea Davì, an outstanding musician from Padua who comes from the band The Beautiful Bunker (also featured on "Nostra Signora delle tenebre") and is active in many other contexts ranging from jazz to contemporary music to the Lay Llamas. Maurizio Boldrin, a legendary drummer from the Padua beat scene of the '60s and later a member of Pino Donaggio's band, left the group in January 2015 after recording Collision #4. He also plays on the tracks from "Symphony For The Devil".

Speaking of "Nostra Signora delle tenebre", why did you choose to cover Morricone's "The Thing" specifically? Your version is really beautiful, but I would have expected something more anthropologically tied to our own homegrown "occult" scene...

Actually, the track was suggested to us by the compilation's curator, Marco Damiani, a great friend of mine. We really liked the piece and stuck to the brief. Even though I love horror, I can't really call myself an expert, so I didn't have a favorite film or theme of my own to suggest. I also didn't mind the idea of taking on the challenge, of being forced to grapple with something we hadn't chosen ourselves.

What about "Symphony For The Devil" - how did that come about?

A bit of messing around and a bit of wanting to "test ourselves". Covers have always fascinated me: they're a challenge, a chance to pay tribute to a sacred monster while putting your own spin on it, even to the point of desecrating it, which is maybe what we did here. One of my all-time favorite covers is "Satisfaction" by Devo, and that's kind of what I was aiming for. "Sympathy For The Devil" is one of my favorite tracks - in my head it's a tribute to The Rolling Stones, but also to Devo, to Lcd Soundsystem (we use the same Casio PT-20 rhythm he uses in "Losing My Edge") and to his love of citation (in one version we "played around" a bit with E2-E4, in the other with shoegaze). We'd just sketched it out and I mentioned it to Chris at Rocket Recordings - it turned out "Sympathy For The Devil" is his favorite song, and he absolutely had to hear the demo, a truly embryonic one that I'd recorded in the rehearsal room just to figure out what we were up to. He was thrilled with it. We kept working on it and put it in our live sets (with mixed results, to be honest), and we didn't move forward with the recordings until this spring, when Chris asked me if I'd finished it. I picked it back up, and the first version I sent him was the one that became the single. He told me: "Ok, you've got the radio edit, now you need the long version and a remix and we'll do a 12-inch". That's where the idea came from to dig up "Anylonger", a track left over from the "Collision #4" sessions, and have both tracks remixed. We suggested "Lucretio" ourselves, to Giant Swan Rocket. The result in both cases was astonishing - yet another transformation.

How did you first connect with Rocket Recordings?

Very simply - by sending an email with a streaming link to the new tracks. Actually, what they ended up releasing isn't exactly what we'd originally presented. We had a finished album ready, one that we'd pitched to various labels here in Italy, and - I won't hide the fact that it still stings a little - an album that was rejected and/or ignored. We started looking abroad, and Rocket was one of the labels we reached out to. Chris immediately showed strong interest, even though he wasn't fully convinced by the record as a whole. He suggested we rework a few things and release them as the split instead. After an initial moment of confusion, I picked the material back up, and I have to say that, thanks also to Chris's input, the tracks took on a different light. For me it was the first time working, even if remotely, with something like a producer, and I have to say I didn't mind it at all. The back-and-forth with Chris and John was also really valuable in finishing off "Symphony For The Devil". We're working on the new album now, and I hope the experience repeats itself.

The self-titled album from 2011 had a dark, ritualistic, monolithic sound, while the tracks on the split are much more rhythmic. Did Rocket's involvement drive that shift, or was it a choice you'd already made?

Not exactly. The tracks were essentially already like that, and they were already part of our live shows. But they were included on an album that tied them together with other tracks more in line with the self-titled record you mentioned. Rocket encouraged us to push this new side further, with "drier" arrangements and mixes, vocals brought more to the front, and to present the tracks one after another. If the album had come out the way I'd originally envisioned it, the break from the previous work probably would have been less obvious. Although I have to say that, for me, the ritualistic side is still very much present - I find rhythm and dance to be extremely ritualistic in themselves.

What direction is the album you're currently working on heading in?

I've got a lot of things in mind, some of them quite ambitious in a way, but we're at a stage where I don't know yet what I'll actually manage to pull off. For now we're working on 3 or 4 tracks, very different from one another and fairly "written" compared to our usual standard, generally quite rhythmic, picking up on what I said earlier. But it's also our intention to do something very free-form and expansive. Basically, last night, once we'd finished recording, we landed on this image to describe it: "A schizophrenic puzzle, complete, but with the pieces forced into place a little."

Let's go back to the beginning: what can you tell me about Jennifer Gentle? You seemed poised to break through commercially as well…

First of all we should agree on what "breaking through commercially" actually means… While I was part of it there was steady growth, and honestly I couldn't have asked for more. We started out recording and pressing our own CDs, handling our own "promotion" with the press, we even found a foreign distributor that sold more copies than our Italian one, we organized our own shows and among others we played with Mogwai, we were the first to bring Acid Mothers Temple to Italy, and in the end we signed, I believe as the first European band, though I could be wrong, a three-album deal with Sub Pop. I put one record out with them and did a 16,000km US tour, 40 shows in 45 days. And I'm sure I'm forgetting something… oh right… even before signing to Sub Pop we treated ourselves to a show at CBGB's, all within 5 years. I gave a huge amount to that band, I got a huge amount back, and I learned a great many things.

Why did you "leave the band"?

At a point when it was going to take a lot of commitment to the band (we were about to start recording the second Sub Pop album, with everything that would have come with it, and there was already talk of a tour in China), I started a family and inevitably had to step aside. Looking back, honestly, I think the relationship between me and Marco wasn't so magical anymore at that point, and we didn't even try to find a way around it.

Artistic differences?

I don't think so… it just wasn't flowing anymore… our lives were out of sync.

At that point had you decided to stop playing, or were Mamuthones already taking shape in your head?

No, I was left pretty disoriented by the whole thing, even though it felt inevitable. I had no practical idea for the future, I certainly didn't want a new band, and giving up playing in the strict sense didn't really bother me… I don't really "play"! I mean, I never pick up an instrument just for the fun of it, and back then my only instrument was drums anyway. When I play, I record, I compose, or at least I try to… at the time it meant starting from zero, even in terms of recording practice — with Jennifer Gentle we'd always worked in analogue, and my new situation was incompatible with analogue gear, so I got a sound card, installed Cubase and started experimenting with it a bit. In any case, before recording a single note I'd already decided on the name Mamuthones, the imagery I wanted to reference, the atmospheres I was after, and that's why I thought that, besides the percussion I already had at home, I needed to add a button accordion. And that's where I started from.

By the way, answering you makes me want to bring up something I read online, and I'd like to hear your take on it, if you're up for it. I came across a comment from one of the many frustrated musicians who populate social media, trashing pretty much all of Italian music… from X-Factor to Verdena, even lumping in — as if, in terms of numbers and commercial potential, these things were even comparable — the Italian Occult Psychedelia bands, who according to him "care more about their album covers than about how they actually play". Now, that made me laugh at first, because the idea of lumping us and our "sibling" bands into the same post that talks about X-Factor is, come on, laughable. But then it got me thinking, and honestly, talking to you — someone who's always paid so much attention to the "scene" (damn/bless you for inventing it!) — I actually want to own that statement (even though, I should say, within the IOP bands there are also musicians who are technically very accomplished). Yes, I can't really play in the strict sense, I'm a pretty poor musician from that point of view. But I've had a couple of ideas in my life, and yes, one of them was exactly that the imagery, the idea of the kind of music you want to make, what you want to express, comes before anything else. And so the album covers matter too, fundamentally. Not having your own imagery, or not knowing how to express it properly, with consistency, has always been, in my view, a major limitation for a lot of Italian bands. Too often people have just tagged along behind whatever foreign band was popular at the time. I believe Mamuthones and the other IOP bands have imposed their own imagery, a very Italian one, and that's something fundamental.

Well, Alessio, what can I say? A serious answer would have to take into account the fact that the internet, in its homogenizing function, tends to flatten very different things onto the same level… still, I think the guy in question simply showed his ignorance by throwing X-Factor, Verdena and Italian Occult Psychedelia into the same pot. So, speaking of imagery: was it the imagery you chose that shaped Mamuthones' music, or did you "choose" that particular imagery based on the music?

Okay, but I wasn't wondering why people online end up lumping everything together, what interested me was your take on the fact that IOP bands have their own clearly defined, "Italian" imagery, and that this matters just as much as the music they play — in fact it completes it, it enhances it. So in a way I've already answered you! In my case it's a bit, if you'll forgive the expression, a chicken-and-egg question. What I fundamentally wanted was a project devoted to ancestral ritual, to archetypes, I had a series of images and sounds in mind, and then I came across these masks, which I didn't know about, and it took no time at all to decide on the band's name. Again, there wasn't a single note recorded yet, but the direction I wanted to go in was crystal clear to me.

Well, the same logic applies here as with kraut-rock — in that case too it was mostly about the sound. If you think about it, every time scenes, artists or bands have broken free from the dogma of American-centrism (and Anglo-centrism), trying instead to draw on the cultural specificities of their own places of origin, they've managed to build something original. Italian Occult Psychedelia is one of those cases, and it's interesting because the imagery turned out to be the unifying element of a scene made up of bands and sounds that are actually very different from one another. Coming back to Mamuthones, which Italian band do you feel closest to, both in terms of imagery and sound?

Well… precisely because of how you've framed it (very well, I might add), I don't think there's such a tight musical kinship between the bands. It's really a matter of imagery and attitude — when we played at Thalassa, that day, we were the only "band" properly speaking. Obviously if you just listen superficially, you might say that day was a pointless mishmash, but in reality there was absolutely a logic to it, despite the really sharp differences in sound and line-up from one band to the next. Maybe we could say Father Murphy, for the religious themes? What do you think?

Father Murphy, absolutely. Listen, speaking of the Italian scene, I know you recently played in England. How was the reception on British soil, and did you notice any attention paid to "Italian things"?

Very good. At the Liverpool Psychedelic Festival it was fantastic, both we and Mai Mai Mai played a great show with a great response. There's a lot of interest in "our" circle. I've just done an interview for a big upcoming article about IOP, I get emails asking for recommendations on which bands to listen to, the music gets played on the radio. Yesterday here an interview came out that Nicola of Lay Llamas did with me — so, nobody's played Wembley yet, but there's a lot of interest in "Italian things".

On “More Alien Than Aliens” you're the only one behind the Mamuthones name. Are you gearing up for a future behind the knobs?

On “Sator” too it was just me. In both cases, though, it's all played live, there's no electronics involved, if that's what you mean by "behind the knobs" - I've got no prejudice against electronic music, and if I felt I needed it for what I want to express, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. For now the synth knobs are enough for me. I'm not ruling out recording something on my own again in the future, but right now I'm working knowing I have three excellent musicians at my disposal, who are also three great people to work and spend time with, and the goal is to push hard in that direction - in fact we've just finished pre-production on four very "played" tracks.

(February 14, 2016)

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