Home / About Artist Link Contact Shop   Mamuthones Bio | Discography | Gallery |   MAMUTHONES - MORE ALIEN THAN ALIENS Year: 2013 Record label: Boring Machines, CorpoC While the band is preparing for the recordings of the fourth album, Mamuthones goes back to the solo output of Alessio Gastaldello for a new EP of meditative and trascendental music. Once again deeply involved in tradition and ancestral memories, More Alien Than Aliens is mostly based on acoustic instruments with the aid of few analogue synthetizers. You can hear antique rites being consumed around fires at night, cavemen’s invocations and signs of extraterrestrial life as seen by the ancients. MAMUTHONES - MAMUTHONES Year: 2011 Record label: Boring Machines This eponymous album is a definite step beyond previous Mamuthones’ releases: it still retains the droney, foreboding darkness of its older siblings, but this time the sound is the one of a raw, aggressive rock trio. Shrouded in a haze of psychedelic noise and firmly rooted to Boldrin’s inventive and powerful drumming, the album gathers a series of crushing performances interspersed with shorter, more reflective interludes. At times hypnotically thundering (The first born), monstrously rhythmic (like on the real tour-de-force that is Ota Benga, all pounding percussion, Sun Ra-styled keyboard solos and fractured guitars) or simply unnerving (check ghostly closer Ave Maria), the album’s heaviness is balanced by tracks like the pulsing Kash-O-Kashak that, with its buzzing bouzouki-like guitars, manages to sound at the same time menacing and melancholic, or the airy, subdued MJ 74 (actually recorded by Maurizio Boldrin back in 1974!). Like a hard-bitten version of Ya Ho Wah 13 dealing with the celestial slowness of a Japanese tea ceremony or a Catholic mass celebrated by a demonic Father Karras, Mamuthones have delivered an album of black, truly anguished psychedelia where the listener can find hope glimmering at the end of the tunnel. MAMUTHONES - SATOR Year: 2009 Record label: Boring Machines Conceived as the first installment of a dyptich whose second part will be released next year, SATOR takes its title from the mysterious engravings found in many ancient Roman ruins and Middle Age European churches: basically a riddle still without a solution, it is also the key to penetrate this album of moods, textures and impenetrable silences. Since the quizzical intro "Me and my thumb" segueing into the majestic ambient soundscape of "In the woods", SATOR reveals itself as a haunting listening experience, shimmering with a sort of dreamlike (or maybe nightmarish?) luminescence. Blackened whispers, Nico-esque harmoniums, subtle synth touches creeping in here and there: everything concurs in creating the melodic but arcane ambience permeating the entire album. But it is not all theta state-inducing droney stuff: "Ota Benga" is a drum-fest coupled with dissonant Fender Rhodes outbursts, "Kash-Ok-Kashak" adds to the mix psychedelic guitar swirls and ominous vocal samples, while closer "Ave Maria" sounds more like an inexorable, nerve-shattering pagan ritual than an actual prayer. And yet SATOR is truly a shamanistic take on Catholic rituals, all performed with an intensity that smells of incense as much as of fire and brimstone. All in all, this is a new token of the improbable weird congregation of psychedelic kindred spirits (Jennifer Gentle, Father Murphy, Slumberwood) currently coalescing in the equally improbable Italian Northeast surroundings.