Fabio Orsi / Mamuthones - The First Born CD

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ASP29 - A Silent Place 2008
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THE FIRST BORN is (quite aptly) the first collaboration between Fabio Orsi (more than a recurring name in the In A Silent Place catalogue) and Mamuthones - better known to friends and family as Alessio Gastaldello and founding member and drummer of Jennifer Gentle, the Italian psych band signed to Sub Pop Records.
After six years with the Jennifers, Alessio split amicably in late 2006 and reinvented himself as Mamuthones, a one-man project delving into primitive percussive jamming and equally primitive one-finger astral keyboard-playing. After a telematic chance meeting with Fabio Orsi, now the crowned prince of the Italian experimental noise, this album slowly started taking shape via e-mails and file-sharing. Built around a series of percussion-cum-keyboard sonic landscapes performed by Mamuthones and enriched by deep, droney electronic layers later added by Orsi, THE FIRST BORN contains four long tracks of dark, brooding modern psychedelia. From the splashing cymbals and martial beat of the title track to the hypnotic surge of "The infinity within" or the ritualistic feast of "The battle", the whole album feels like an ancient sea ebbing and flowing on some distant alien shore, making for a curiously disjointed listening experience, at the same time peaceful and menacing. The ever-shifting sonic textures evoke both the starchildren krautrockers of old and more recent outer-world explorers but always keep a strong personal identity, firmly rooted in the current weird Italian take on space rock. CD released in an extra heavy and luxurious package!