Ustmamò

The iconography of “Üst” opens on a vision: the Pietra di Bismantova, like a Kubrickian monolith, emerging out of its own world. The cliff that Dante chose among the earthly images of his Purgatorio is here plucked from the Apennines, dematerialized and handed over to an impossible geography: water, sky, rock. Around it, an ouroboros closes the circle, devouring its own tail. At the center, three letters: Üst.
Of the name Üstmamò, only a particle survives, a phonetic relic, almost its active ingredient. And that, in the end, is what happens to the band on their 1996 album: they shed weight, coordinates, any too-certain sense of belonging. The mountain is set adrift at sea. The Üstmamò, up to that point a proudly Apennine creature, expose themselves to the currents of the wider world: dub, sampling, electronics, Bristol, trip-hop. The band had been born a few years earlier, in 1991, far from the recognized centers of the Italian avant-garde, in a valley of the Reggio Emilia Apennines. Luca Alfonso Rossi, Ezio Bonicelli, Simone Filippi and Mara Redeghieri came from a territory where dialect was not yet an aesthetic device and folk song didn't need to be promoted as world music. Giovanni Lindo Ferretti had recognized them almost immediately, drawing them into the orbit of Dischi del Mulo and that irregular constellation that would lead from CCCP to CSI.

On their first two albums, the Üstmamò had crashed together punk and nursery rhyme, noise and tradition, guitars, rudimentary electronics, Italian, English, French and the Reggio Emilia dialect. Not so much a style as a permanent state of agitation. But by the middle of the decade, that combustion had begun to run out of oxygen. In January 1996, interviewed by Il Manifesto, Redeghieri and Rossi revealed that the band had come close to splitting up. What weighed on them most was a kind of obligation to detonate: the dictatorship of feedback, the idea that an Üstmamò concert had to inevitably collapse into chaos. What was needed was not more noise, but less.
The first deviation came from Jah Wobble, discovered thanks to their friend Paolo Minella. Then Mara Redeghieri encountered “Dummy” by Portishead. It was, in her own words, a revelation. Almost a conversion on the road to Bristol, one that set in motion something that had seemed stuck: a new inspiration, another idea of music.

Human, all too human, the songs on “Üst” seem almost to contradict the cosmology of the cover art. They don't gaze at the universe: they stay at eye level, where desires, waiting, small emotional transactions, domestic fears, newspapers, telephones, television sets play out. It's a provincial existence. Fidelity to detail, to badly spoken words, to objects destined to grow old, to the tiny rituals through which each of us tries to be recognized, is what allows these songs to effortlessly transcend the place and time to which they belong.
The incipit, with “Cuore/Amore”, takes two of the most worn-out words in the entire Western songbook and tries to give them back some weight. It isn't really a love song, but rather the portrait of an identity still taking shape: a “little woman” suspended in a vague state of waiting, unable to find the words to name herself. Redeghieri isn't describing a femininity already achieved, but the uncertainty of its becoming, that middle ground where being a woman still means asking oneself what a woman is. Even the voice takes part in this irresolution: it thins out, lightens its delivery until it brushes against a childlike sing-song, as though the girl who came before still stubbornly survived within the adult figure. In the video, Redeghieri's face tinted blue further heightens this sense of unreality, as if she were a creature caught mid-metamorphosis. And the introduction had already set up this slight sense of displacement: an oblique, vaguely Eastern-tinged movement, a sinuous, suspended melodic line that doesn't so much point to any specific East as express the will to immediately take the song outside the usual coordinates of Italian pop-rock.

In “Memobox” the same question of identity has already found its machine. The artifact is exquisitely '90s: personal ads, voicemail boxes, desires entrusted to an answering machine. Men and women present themselves through requirements, fantasies, measurements, qualities, caveats; intimacy becomes a questionnaire, desire becomes information. And yet it's precisely the obsolescence of the object that makes the song more unsettling today. “Memobox” didn't need to predict social networks or dating apps: it had already recognized the underlying mechanism. Before reaching the other person, one must first manufacture a communicable version of oneself. The person is preceded by their own profile. Here the earlier Üstmamò are still perfectly recognizable: the taste for collage, the distorted nursery rhyme, the promiscuous meeting of popular culture and the language of consumerism, the comic that suddenly lets something sinister filter through. Even the old punk attitude survives, as long as you no longer look for it in the volume of the guitars: it lives instead in the sabotage of languages, in the indifference to hierarchies of high and low, in the possibility of placing an advertising jingle-voice next to a sexual urge and turning it into anthropology. This is demonstrated above all by “Indice di borsa”, where, beneath a completely new phonetic surface, the old combative instinct of the Üstmamò resurfaces. With Luca Alfonso Rossi on vocals and the Europeiani as guests, the track moves over a dark, obsessive pulse that looks openly toward the Bristol of Massive Attack and its surroundings, while the lyrics hurl free-market men, money, financial indexes and even an explicit "Fininvest invest invest" into the groove. This is 1996: Silvio Berlusconi's entry into politics is still recent news, and the hybridization of television empire, economic power and political representation has just inaugurated a new season in Italy. The Üstmamò take it on without retreating a single step from the explosive fury of their early days.

What's new, however, is the phonetic space in which all of this takes place. In "Memobox" the bass moves in circles, the dub rhythm seems to spiral in on itself without ever really landing; above all, the voice stops being a mere vehicle for the lyrics and becomes material for the arrangement itself. Redeghieri lists, seduces, declaims, imitates, changes person and register, splits in two until communication itself becomes a small acoustic theater. In "Canto del vuoto" the process is reversed: the voice grows rarefied along with the music and seems to measure distances within a kind of futurist dub-western, made more of silences, reverbs and empty horizons than of any real genre signifiers. For a few moments it feels like standing before a frontier landscape after someone has replaced its dust with electronics. Then the track gradually folds back toward a more classic, almost pop-song form, without ever fully shedding that unease: beneath the melody, samples and synthetic presences keep moving, like a second, barely perceptible landscape.
In "Schermo splendente" repetition instead makes it hypnotic, almost impersonal, as if the singing ended up taking on the same reflective, automatic nature as the screen evoked in the lyrics. The voice is one of the decisive instruments on "Üst": it doesn't simply rest on top of the music, it moves through it, continually altering its density and temperature. The new electronic direction of the Üstmamò perhaps owes more to this different conception of vocal space than to the mere presence of samplers.

But "Üst" refuses to be reduced to its electronic conversion. Just listen to the slow, extremely fragile pace of the wonderful "Piano con l'affetto", with the violin running through its cracks and a nearly defenseless Redeghieri, to understand how much the band's vocabulary had by then expanded: dub and trip-hop coexist with folk residues, oblique song forms, nursery rhyme, ambient, raggamuffin, without any of these influences ever being flaunted as identity.
"Onde sulle onde" occupies yet another zone: a sweet, almost resigned ballad that moves through small circular motions and occasionally lets the singing fade into speech, as if melody alone were no longer enough to contain the thought. It's one of the moments where "Üst" seems to deliberately forget its own modernity, only to let its traces surface beneath the surface: a discreet pulse, a construction of space, a sensitivity to repetition that keeps the song from ever closing back into a traditional form.

The same thing happens with languages. They keep piling up, though less flauntingly than in the early days; and it's not just a matter of languages in the strict sense. The album puts the Reggio Emilia dialect of "Biguldun" into dialogue with the warped, plasticized English of "Baby Dull", financial jargon, advertising speak, the impersonal voice of telecommunications, the private lexicon of intimacy and, finally, the solemn language of political memory. It's not so much multilingualism as a promiscuity of codes.
These are idioms belonging to different worlds that, in the media-saturated Italy of the Nineties, had by then begun to coexist without necessarily understanding one another: dialect and finance, the provinces and commercial television, the memory of the Resistance and the lexicon of consumerism, intimacy and automated communication. Cultures and registers crowd into the same space without ever truly merging, like images flickering on the same screen, or samples pulled from distant sources and forced to share the same track. The Reggio Emilia band makes no attempt to resolve this babel: it takes it on as the condition of the present and turns it into musical material.

In the end, "Siamo i ribelli della montagna" resurfaces. Üstmamò had already recorded it in 1995 for "Materiale resistente", the project born for the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation; on "Üst" it returns with the subtitle "Versione resistente". So it's not so much the song that changes as the landscape surrounding it. There, it belonged to an explicitly commemorative work; here, it arrives after samplers and dub basslines, screens and automated voices, desires entrusted to technology. Having journeyed through the future, the record returns to its own starting point. "Siamo i ribelli della montagna/ viviam di stenti e di patimenti/ ma quella fede che ci accompagna / sarà la legge dell'avvenir". And just when the song itself seems to have died out, a voice surfaces from the bottom of the recording: "Aldo dice ventisei per uno". The coded message that in April 1945 announced the uprising in Turin has itself become a sound sample: History absorbed into the same machine that, throughout "Üst", has gathered, distorted and recirculated voices, signals, languages, fragments of the present. This is where the ouroboros on the cover finally reveals its full meaning. The four musicians' movement is not a flight forward but a return: modernity is explored, absorbed, chased through its most fluid and indecipherable forms, until what seemed left behind is found again. In the dark, unstable sea of the present, the Resistance then re-emerges, standing out like the mountain on the cover: not a nostalgic shelter, but a solid mass against which to measure the drift.
All around, everything flows, shifts, recombines. But that faith that accompanies them endures.

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16/08/2026