Review: Upupayāma ‘Honesty Flowers’
To explore the musical world of Alessio Ferrari, aka Upupayāma, whom I have known since his very first musical debut, is to cross a threshold. As one of the most revered and underground figures in Italian psychedelic and raga-inflected acid folk rock, he has spent years quietly building a body of work that feels more inspired, rather than planned.
Based in Parma, in the heart of Emilia Romagna, Ferrari is a multi-instrumentalist of rare devotion, and listening to him has always felt like stepping into something otherworldly: a realm of enchantment, with a gentle light where ordinary things start to feel magical and hard to describe.
This is his world, and what strikes me most when returning to his music again and again is the quality of attention he brings to it. There is something that borders on the sacred in his approach, not in any formal or ideological sense, but in the way a craftsman might return, day after day, to the same piece of wood, certain that something extraordinary is still waiting inside it.
Every record Upupayāma makes feels like a further excavation: a deeper listening, a quieter and more precise uncovering. Each piece seems to be born from moments stolen from ordinary time; intervals of stillness and reflection transformed into something luminous and enduring. That imagination is fed, above all, by the natural world. Ferrari‘s connection to the land and countryside around him is not incidental; it is its very grain. You can hear it: the unhurried pace of fields at dusk, the texture of bark and soil, the silence that settles between one bird song and the next. His music does not so much seem written as grown – rising from the earth as it does from the mind, patient and inevitable as a season turning.
As for the previous three works, also his fourth, gently titled Honesty Flowers, to celebrate this colourful garden plant known as Lunaria in Italian, was recorded in the stillness of his countryside barn. It is a place that, by now, carries the memory of all his music: the walls have absorbed all his musical thoughts during countless late sessions, the floor knows the weight of his instruments, the silence between takes is itself a kind of collaborator. Where every instrument is played with candid love from the musicians’ hands, through imaginary narratives of unknown worlds that nonetheless belong entirely to him, seen through his mind’s vision – worlds that feel remote and yet deeply familiar, as though you have dreamed them before without knowing their name.
The album was born from listening to lots of funk music from all over the world, lots and lots of African music, and from listening to himself. He spent whole nights playing all kinds of percussion instruments, alone in the barn, the countryside dark and quiet around him, as he recalls: ‘I would fall into a sort of trance and play the same rhythm for hours on congas or on a djembe.’ In that trance something loosens, finding grooves that the intellect would never have reached alone. It is the oldest form of music-making, and Alessio pursues it with the devotion of someone who understands just that. This is the feeling you get when you listen to this enthralling album: that you are hearing music made from the inside out, from the rhythm outward, from the body into the air.
This is music made by a dedicated musician who always continues to expand his musical horizon…
Honesty Flowers is a double album full of seventy minutes of music that moves so beautifully, absorbing funk, psychedelia, acid folk, and ritual percussion. The opening track, Fliiim / Laliīmph, are two movements that together map the album’s emotional landscape. The first is rhythmically tribal and ferocious – the kind of funk that Can might have made had they spent their formative years in West Africa rather than Cologne. The second dissolves into something altogether more expansive. A wide, horseback drift across open steppe, the pulse still there beneath the surface but now serving space rather than momentum. It is a remarkable opening manoeuvre, establishing at once that this is a record comfortable with contradiction.
Gilded Meditations deepens the strangeness. Where the opener was kinetic, this is ceremonial – the introduction conjures the interior of something ancient and enclosed, a gathering taking place in a hollow space far from ordinary time. The funk element persists but transformed into something heavier with ritual implication. Mystic Chords Of Memory follows in a similar groove but with a more combative, almost antagonistic energy, as though the ceremony has been interrupted by argument.
Oyob is the record’s most direct statement, splitting itself cleanly between pagan ceremony and straightforward rock force. It is the moment where Ferrari seems least interested in nuance and more interested in power; the contrast is bracing. In The Solstice Sun performs one of the album’s most striking transformations. Beginning as a meditation on human corruptibility over a backdrop of gentle singing that gradually sheds its gravity and tips into something almost celebratory with acid trance funky rhythms.
Sound Mirrors, the quietest piece on the record, grows slowly, as if setting the stage for a nocturnal ceremony. While the musical kindness of Mokushō is a piece whose roots reach back to Ferarri‘s earliest work. Here you are caught in a hypnotic continuous performance. Old Sky, Wandering Clouds, and Yuya show a profound artistic maturity, exhibiting his patient confidence. Baobab, the album’s shortest track, is sunny, cheerful and joyful, with his quasi-childlike voice that evokes the sweet simplicity of a nursery rhyme, while Morning Temple closes everything into a quiet natural end.
What makes Honesty Flowers remarkable is the way it’s come together. The sense that every instrument chosen, every rhythm sustained, every transition between states of feeling has been considered with complete seriousness and total love. This is music made by a dedicated musician who always continues to expand his musical horizon, who has listened deeply and widely to African percussion, to global funk, to the particular silence of a barn in the small hours and who has found, in all of that listening, a voice that is entirely and unmistakably his own.
Label: Fuzz Club Records
Band Links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
