Upupayama - Nonsense is even freer now

Looked at closely, it's the psychedelic genre itself that demands it. The inherent search for alternative realities, for surreal overlaps, means that the cosmos can be rural. Upupayāma, aka Alessio Ferrari, has managed to make this concrete through a projection that turned his home region — a mountain town in the province of Parma — into a lysergic landscape steeped in Eastern sonorities and words that only make sense in everyone's own desire to give in to nonsense.

On his self-titled debut, released last year as a self-produced, digital-only release and now reissued with an unreleased track and a physical format through two labels (Cardinal Fuzz for Europe and the UK, Centripetal Force for North America), Upupayāma/Ferrari offers a psychedelia built on play. The playful side of his music is there from the stage name itself, which places the hoopoe in the mountains (yāma being the Japanese word for mountain), far from its actual real-world habitat; and it continues in the linguistic dimension, made up of invented, meaningless lyrics, with the precise aim of serving the musicality and visionary power of the voice. His musical flow is therefore made as much of spirituality as of fun, a fusion that has made the record one of the most beloved debuts on the recent psych scene (the red vinyl edition sold out the very morning of the first day of pre-orders).

We had already flagged his work by including a track in the 2020 psychedelia playlist, and we now dig deeper with an interview with Ferrari, whom we thank.

Listening back to the record, I thought about how much potential these tracks have in a live setting. On Cardinal Fuzz's website I then read that you're looking for musicians to take the record on the road. So I wanted to ask you if you have any previous experience, where you're at in the search for musicians, and what ambitions and concerns you have for this new chapter of the record.

Yes, I have previous experience, I've been playing since I was a kid, since I was 13, starting out in bands into punk music…

You actually told me by email that your first musical love was the Clash.

Yes, exactly, with "London Calling". That's where the passion started. Until two years ago I also had a band, with which I made music similar to what I later developed on my own. As often happens, there were diverging points of view. I've always experienced it in a visceral way and by certain standards, meaning either you do it a certain way or you don't do it at all. Let's say you reach a point where either you share a way of living music with others (which goes beyond taste), or it's better to just let it go. You know, I live in Parma, a beautiful city but a fairly provincial one; I've had people say things to me like: "Well, people might not like this" and I'd reply that first and foremost you have to do what you like yourself. So I preferred to carry on alone.

As for finding musicians for live shows, I've found the core lineup, meaning — besides me on guitar and vocals — another guitar, a bass and drums. The biggest challenge will be finding three more people, one on sitar and various percussion, one on keyboards and one on flute. We'll pick it up again after summer, right now I'm recording a second record and focusing on that. I'm convinced these are songs that lend themselves very well, as you said, to a live dimension, and above all it'll be a matter of not playing them exactly as they sound on record, but developing them even further: I can picture taking "White Oak" from the album's nine minutes to even half an hour live.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, when I listened back to the record, I imagined a free-form live version of the tracks, letting them stretch out to 40 minutes without any problem.

Yes, exactly. It wasn't a deliberate choice, but listening back to the record, I thought you could create live – pardon the teenage-sounding term – a great head trip, like a lot of bands are already doing, for instance Garcia Peoples, Kikagaku Moyo, and of course like the Grateful Dead used to do. The idea is precisely to play maybe just three songs, but stretch them out over an hour and a half of concert.

That's really intriguing, actually. I completely agree with your take on things, I think it's the right one.

Yes, I'm convinced of it. In fact I won't give up, I want to make it happen because I know something beautiful would come out of it. I've already had a few invitations to play live, both for this year (and here I had to decline for obvious reasons), but also for next year, at festivals in Italy and abroad, so that would be the icing on the cake.

Looking again at the Cardinal Fuzz website, I noticed that compared to the digital version of the album that came out last year, the tracklist is in a different order. What's behind that change?

There are two reasons. The first is a matter of vinyl space. With the addition of "Hopsa-Japapé" and the running order I'd laid out for the digital version, the tracks simply wouldn't have fit. The second is that last year I was in a big hurry to get the record out and hadn't really thought the sequencing through properly. Listening back, I felt like changing the order actually worked well.

Was "Hopsa-Japapé" born out of the same sessions, or did it come later?

It's from the same sessions, it's just that I'd originally conceived it for a two-song EP, because I've got a lot of other material in the works. I'd actually thought of an EP with "Hopsa-Japapé" and another track that runs about 30 minutes. But then I thought it would be nice to put out the vinyl with one extra song. It sounds like a self-promotional move, but I swear I didn't pitch it to Cardinal Fuzz and Centripetal Force with that in mind.

So it was your own proposal, not the labels asking you for extra material.

Yes, they only wanted the original four tracks, but putting out a debut vinyl with just four songs felt a bit thin to me, so I said to myself: "Alright, let's add one." They listened to it, liked it a lot, and it actually fits well with the overall mood too.

Yes, absolutely. Another thing that occurred to me listening back to the record – even though I'm well aware it's not something with any real connection – is that your voice, your way of singing, brings to mind Lou Reed. In my view, you share his same gift for "talk-singing".

Ah, nice! No one's ever told me that before, but now that you've got me thinking about it, it's actually true.

I was fairly sure it wasn't intentional, but I had this little "epiphany". Setting that aside, what value do you place on your singing within the musical context?

I don't consider myself a singer, I never learned how, I never worked at it. But singing plays a very important role in my music, it does on this record and it will even more so on the one I'm working on now, because what I want is for the voice to have the value of an additional instrument, not a vehicle for messages. A lot of people have asked me why I use this invented language. I grew up with the Clash, who placed a lot of importance on lyrics, but when I make music I've never wanted to push some grand message. I experience it differently, even though I do appreciate artists who give lyrics a dominant importance. I always try to let the creation of a landscape, an experience, take precedence. Coming back to the voice, I think of it as one more musical instrument. There's no song form in my tracks, no verse, chorus and so on, precisely because I want the voice to be an added sound. I don't know if it's a lack of confidence in my abilities, in not considering myself a singer. Maybe the track whose structure comes closest to a song format is the last one, "Hello Green Man, I Am A Tiger", where it does seem like I'm telling some kind of story. I thought about putting real lyrics on it, but then I figured that would put it on a single track and leave it stuck there. What I like instead is the idea that the impressions change depending on the listener. I've never actually worked out whether Kikagaku Moyo sing in Japanese or not, my sense is that they don't, and yet they manage to convey different impressions to me every time I listen to them. Even the same song can change depending on the moment I listen to it. That's their greatest quality, and it's what I wanted to do myself too, almost as a kind of homage.

Indeed, there's the problem, historic I'd even say, of certain strands of psychedelia getting trapped in a kind of rhetoric.

Exactly, that's it, you took the words right out of my mouth. I didn't say it, but that's part of it too. Sometimes a lot of psychedelia makes me smile because it seems like a caricature of itself.

Yes, exactly. It worked in the '60s because there was a historical context that could justify it, but nowadays it honestly makes you smile.

Yeah, a little bit now. For me, talking now the way people talked in the '60s doesn't make sense.

No, absolutely not. To connect this to the previous point, about rhetoric and wanting to avoid it, there's an instrument on your record that's potentially the epitome of psychedelic rhetoric, namely the sitar. How did you want to use it, and how do you conceive of it in general?

I started playing it about two years ago, so quite recently. I taught myself, which is madness — in fact I say it under my breath, because some Indian musician would shoot me in the face for it! Obviously, having started out playing guitar, I play it... well, I try to play it the way it's played in India, obviously within all the limits that implies, because we have a completely different musical conception. That said, I've seen contemporary bands play sitar with a pick, and it's a bit hair-raising — personally, I don't do that. On the record I wanted to use it almost like a third guitar; what you hear here is a raw, unadorned sitar, while in the future I'd like to experiment a bit more. It's an endless instrument, but at the same time it's somewhat limited, because you're always playing within a scale. Here I used it as a kind of supporting guitar. My passion for it came from listening to Ravi Shankar — I got hooked, and from there came the curiosity to buy one and start learning, even though, as they say in India, it takes a lifetime to learn how to play it and a lifetime to actually play it. I want to broaden my knowledge of it, also because it's an incredibly fun instrument to play.

Contrary to what you might expect on a first listen, you place a lot of importance on percussion, on the rhythm section.

I'm lucky enough to live in a mountain town with few inhabitants, in a detached house; that lets me make all the racket I want. I started out having an absolute blast destroying a timpani I'd bought. To explain better, I need to take a step back: the musicians I've recruited so far for the live dimension aren't technical monsters, because I place a lot of importance on improvisation; playing a drum kit I built myself piece by piece, not knowing how to play, being totally free of academic and technical constraints (which sometimes don't seem to, but do hold you back) makes you realize just how important rhythm is in so-called psychedelic music, which can draw on any musical genre, any kind of contamination.

Both "White Oak" and "The Blue Magician's Fantasy" end with instrumental codas that suggest an approach toward classic rock, without obviously being that. Do you think there's "classic" rock in your record?

Yes, a lot. I feel it especially in the unreleased track, "Hopsa-Japapé". I really like classic rock, even though it's always hard to define: I might be committing blasphemy, but to me Grateful Dead are classic rock...

You're not committing blasphemy, I fully agree.

It might sound a bit snobbish — though it really isn't — but a lot of neo-psych bands, the bands we have today... I'm not saying I don't like them, but I find it hard to listen to them for very long. The ones I could listen to forever, I can count on one hand. That's because, in my opinion, they don't draw on a sense of classicism, which is actually a good thing, since it's an inexhaustible source of interesting ideas. I think of Grateful Dead, of Quicksilver Messenger Service, who to me were classic rock — so much so that the songs I'm working on for the second record, which I've just finished writing and still have to record, feel even more classic to me, and I like them more than these ones. So yes, I feel a lot of classic rock in these tracks.

For instance, in the instrumental coda of "White Oak" I think I can hear the riff from "Roadhouse Blues" by The Doors.

Well, this might sound strange, but I've never liked The Doors. Maybe, yeah, there's something there...

...no, but exactly, these are perceptions that are probably unrelated, but that just surface like that, like little flashes of insight.

Yeah, that's the beautiful thing, because it gave you one feeling and it might give someone else a completely different one.

Going back to what you said earlier, about living in a small mountain village in the Parma area: so the cover art is an idealized, Japanese-flavored version of your own land, I imagine.

Absolutely, it is.

The cover is really beautiful. I pay a lot of attention to the aesthetic quality of records, and it's rare these days for something to strike me right away and for that feeling to last over time. Yours managed to do that. So I wanted to ask: as both an artist and a collector, how much value do you place on the aesthetic/graphic quality of records?

I'd say it's almost as important as the music, though not quite equal to it. I've bought plenty of records sight unseen, sound unheard, just because I liked the cover.

Same here! Sometimes I end up disappointed by the music, but I still stay under the spell of the cover.

Exactly. I keep it and look at it because it's a beautiful object. I see a lot of bands, especially in Italy (and this makes me sad, because we have so much good stuff out there)...

...who sell poorly because they don't offer an adequate physical fetish object to go with it.

Yes, because whoever buys a record, especially a vinyl record, isn't just buying songs to listen to, but an object, a...

A painting, almost.

Yes. Just to give you an example, I'm also an avid reader, and even there Italian publishing only really woke up to this in recent years. You look at foreign book covers and they're gorgeous, and it bothers me that we don't do the same here, because to me it matters. When Daniel Onufer, the guy who designed the cover and played drums on "Hopsa-Japapé", showed me the final result, I wasn't expecting it to be that beautiful — I think he did an amazing job. He drove me a little crazy and I gave him a hard time with all sorts of revisions, but in the end he really did great work.

"Upupayāma" can be purchased on the official Bandcamp accounts of Cardinal Fuzz and Centripetal Force, and is available on all major streaming platforms.