Upupayama – Honesty Flowers
Upupayama shift focus on new Fuzz Club album release
Sometimes you pick up records thinking you know what you’re going to get and expecting to be in familiar territory….this one caught me off-guard and most definitely took me to places I didn’t anticipate..Upupayama (essentially Alessio Ferrari who plays all the instruments on the records) have released 3 studio albums and one live set over the last few years and throughout all these releases have created a shifting world of strange beauty. There is certainly continuity here with that ethereal feel still apparent but the sound has taken a twist towards a more direct approach; more powerful and with a lot more swagger – more ‘rock’ than previous albums – that’s rock in a reverb-heavy gritty psychedelic 70s soundtrack style.
The opening track ‘Fliiim/Lalimph’ runs to 11 minutes and is an odyssey in itself; propelled from the start by tribal percussion and bass then an overload of wah-wah guitar effects it leads you through a frenetic tribal dance and then breaks halfway through for a more reflective flute interlude before coalescing again into trippy psychedelic drift and shimmer.
This feel of an epic journey or unfolding story is also reflected across the length of the whole double album as it ebbs and flows and flickers through different tempos and atmospheres, transcending ‘normal’ song structures in favour of a rising and falling episodic approach, with the opening 6 tracks overall (slightly) heavier and more frenzied than the rest of the record which feels more rooted in the unique Upupayama world we know from previous records.
By the time you get to the third track ‘Mystic Chords Of Memory’ you’re spellbound and in a different world… a charged voodoo funk wigout with echoes of Agharta/Pangaea era Miles Davis letting it all go in Japan – pounding percussion and mystical driving pagan fuzz, sweat soaked and intense and trance inducing.
The whole album is a mind expanding polyrythmic excursion through a cascade of images and atmospheres – it’s a festival site at dawn, a voodoo ceremony, a pagan gathering, a 1970s black magic movie or a surreal fantasy world…wherever your head takes you.
‘Honesty Flowers’ keeps alien time and speaks in exotic new tongues and will have you moving to different rhythms ….a ceremony in 11 parts…time slows down, reality shifts and time fades. Upupayama have always sounded elemental and spiritual with plenty of pastoral and rustic moments but here show a newfound grit and groove; here there are some heady doses of visceral funked up, fuzzed up occult frequencies….coming from deep within the underworld to feed your head..
Gary Powell, May 2026
Available from Fuzz Club Records
