Ready for a collection of ritualistic mantras cloaked in psychedelic ambience? Alessio Gastaldello and his monolithic Mamuthones project have got just the thing for you if so. From Word to Flesh, the new Mamuthones album is seriously WEIRD!
Release Date: 18th April 2025
Label: Black Hole – a Rocket Records imprint
Formats: Vinyl / Digital
MAMUTHONES – AN EXPLANATION (OF SORTS…)
The Sardinian ritual of the Mamuthones, in which sinister masked figures, weighed down with cattle bells, conduct a ceremonial procession to ward off evil forces. A ritual which has gone on for some two thousand years and opinions thus vary as to its origin or meaning. Perhaps, the most plausible explanation is that these ghoulish avatars are engaged in a celebration of the endless cycles of death and rebirth, fortifying spirits for a new epoch.
It that introduction to the Mamuthones concept – and to the music of Mamuthones, the project masterminded by Italian musician Alessio Gastaldello – sounds a bit strange, it won’t do, once you’ve had a listen to From Word to Flesh. Psychedelic, ambient and scarily dystopian in equal parts, From Word to Flesh is a seriously WEIRD album.
FROM WORD TO FLESH
From Word To Flesh is the belated follow-up to Mamuthones’ 2018 album, Fear On The Corner. Plans to take the “psychedelic fortitude and beat-driven hedonism” that exemplified Fear On The Corner onto the next stage were well-advanced but were interrupted by the pandemic. Eventually, however, Alessio steered those plans back on course, as he explains:
“Yes, a lot has happened indeed and I can easily say that the fears our previous album was centred around all brutally became all too real. I believe that, with [From Word To Flesh] a circle has been closed. We returned to the atmosphere of the first Mamuthones albums with the skills required throughout the journey, with new sounds and with new creative processes. I would say that what remains constant – and at the core of our music – is the obsessive rhythms and the search for sonic rituality: this is, for certain, our trademark.”
HYPNOTIC REPITITION
The ominous percussive rhythms that launch opening track, Burn From Inside, set a mood that prevails throughout the whole of From Word To Flesh. Sinister keyboards strengthen the sound as Alessio’s voice starts to echo around the room. It’s disconcerting, but it has warmth. It’s too earthy to be psychedelic and it’s too psychedelic to be earthy. The album’s press release uses the term “hypnotic repetition” to describe the continuous keyboard theme that persists throughout the piece. That’s a great description. So sit back and relax, whilst strings tinkle, guitars whine and strange things happen…
The vibrancy of the percussion is stepped up and an echoey bass sound evokes images of a fiery cave for the sinister A Cage Full of Sins. Alessio speaks his lyrics to unsettling effect on a tune that is as hypnotic as its predecessor and infinitely more disturbing. African rhythms and a smooth piano figure bring an element of jazz to Can’t Be Done. There’s something of a 60’s feel. Indeed, I found myself humming along with the Daytripper riff as Alessio voices the song’s central message: “Can’t be done till the day is gone.”
TURN UP THE WEIRDNESS!
Classical guitar is the surprise accompaniment to the chanted lyrics of Before You Leave. Described as “a mournful lament,” the song is one of the album’s more overtly psychedelic offerings. Lysergically dreamlike and unconventionally melodic. Alessio’s lyrics are submerged in swirls of guitar and swooshes of ambient keyboard. When the violin kicks in, the weirdness dial is turned up even higher.
Apparently inspired by the psych-folk experimentation of Bristol band, Beak, A Symmetry Of Faith is something of an album centrepiece. Electronic sounds build slowly before an African drumbeat breaks out and acoustic guitars find a place to sit. The voices, when they eventually arrive, sound like a nightmarish choir. Afain, I sense Beatle influences in the pure, guitar-drenched psychedelia that conclude the track.
THE WORDS OF WERNER HERZOG
Alessio quotes the final speech of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre – The Wrath Of God in the epic Son Of Myself. Distorted, wah-wah guitar sounds dominate the song’s lengthy, contemplative introduction, before Alessio commences his recitation. The light, sharp percussion and the bell-like tones of the chiming guitar give the piece an Oriental feel. And why the Herzog quotation? Alessio explains: “I would like to see that what I share with both Herzog and Aguirre is the conquest of the useless, but I’m not that presumptuous.”
And, to close From Word To Flesh, Alessio has opted for a chunk of pure ambience. Another slow electronic fade-in introduces closing track, Carry On. Alessio’s voice has a demonic edge as he repeats his “Carry on” mantra. It packs a disturbing punch until the track starts to fade, as slowly as it came in, into a dreamlike state of electronic reverie.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Looking back on From Word To Flesh, Alessio had this to say: “Every morning, I wake up and think: ‘I wonder what could happen today’ . Almost every day, there is something that startles me, a new horror that I would never have imagined. I think this mood can be found in these new songs. However, sometimes surprisingly, there are even sparse moments of hope, glimpses of unexpected light in the darkness. The new album is undoubtedly, a reflection on ourselves, on our feelings, on our doubts, on our delusions too. I think the Mamuthones have never been so unmediated, so naked – all masks gone.”
Watch the official video to Burn From Inside, the album’s opening track, below:
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