Hura Mayura

"Hura Mayura", the new work by Mammut Nel Caos, seems at last to shake off the opaque, extremely introspective patina that hovered over the 2015 debut album "Morbus Sacer Vol.1: Ordo ab Chao", where a deliberately low-fi sound predominated, agreeably supporting hermetically decomposed laments and chants. The veil of Maya has been torn — to quote Arthur Schopenhauer — and where before the Marsala multi-instrumentalist Angelo Barraco felt the need to devote himself in complete autonomy to writing and recording the pieces, for the new record the modus operandi has changed entirely.

"Hura Mayura was a sleep with the lights off, interrupted by a sun that scraped the sky, through a closed window and the wet sheets of silent sin", as the sleeve notes explain. The cover shows the Russian doctor Leonid Rogozov operating on himself for appendicitis on 30 April 1961. A bare, raw cover image, without any censorship, which objectively depicts a man operating on himself in a situation of extreme danger but which, metaphorically, symbolises a man severed before a society that observes his purity and his true self. A gash before the world.

The digital album is made of 5 tracks produced between Sicily and Ecuador — precisely in the city of Quito, in the Pichincha region — over a span running from 2015 to 2017, with the collaboration of Renè Delacroix, who took care of the arrangements, sampling, mixing and mastering. Angelo Barraco handled, as always, all arrangements, lyrics, voice, sounds, production and post-production. The opening track features Umberto Palazzo, leader of Santo Niente and an icon of the Italian alternative rock scene of the nineties, shouting a phrase that seems to burst out of the stereo speakers; on two tracks Nicol Paladino lends her voice. The voice that closes the record is that of Paolino Canzoneri, who kindly contributed by reciting a poem written by Angelo Barraco.

An album steeped in psychedelia, in distorted and acoustic sounds that give themselves over to long, dilated feedback locked together with synths, fighting an exhausting battle of unstable and disconnected balances which find perfect symmetry with the background noises that hold in line a short but intense record.