Upupayāma – Honesty Flowers

When Alessio Ferrari first turned up on these pages through 2024’s Mount Elephant, delivered courtesy of one of those much-appreciated Fuzz Club parcels, his Upupayāma project felt like journey into another world. The Italian multi-instrumentalist had built six tracks from percussion, sitar, flute and guitars, with every part feeding music full of colour, movement and curiosity. I ended that review happily under its spell. Two years later, album number four comes back through the same trusted label with its feet somehow moving faster and its gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the path ahead. Honesty Flowers extends across eleven tracks and roughly seventy minutes, giving Ferrari enough room to build a whole new world for us to lose ourselves in.

Ferrari wrote, played and recorded the record in his barn studio in a small mountain village overlooking Parma. On stage, Upupayāma expands into a six-piece band, with the songs morphing through performance and improvisation. Here the starting point is one man surrounded by his instruments listening closely to where a repeated figure might take him. Honesty Flowers follows the handmade warmth of Ferrari’s earlier work while bringing its rhythmic instincts right to the front.

Ferrari describes the origins of the album in very physical terms.

That sense of travel shapes everything that follows. You enter through the beat, and through the music you are sent on your way.

The album begins by establishing its pulse. ‘Fliiim / Laliīmph’ feels like Ferrari opening every door at once, allowing percussion, fuzz and repeated guitar figures to set the room in motion. He describes ‘Fliiim’ as though Can had chosen to write a funk song, and that thought fits the track’s earthy forward movement. The first part keeps the body alert, circling a groove with increasing heat, while ‘Laliīmph’ carries that energy towards broad open ground, a crossing powered by rhythm and the promise of an unknown destination. It makes for a generous beginning, one that tells you straight away that this album wants your feet involved as much as your imagination.

After that long departure, ‘Gilded Meditations’ draws you into a closer circle. Ferrari pictured the opening as entering the hollow of a tree and finding a ritual already underway inside, and the track carries that enclosed, communal quality. The percussion feels close enough to touch, with each beat guiding the surrounding textures into place. The insistent flute and rhythmic wah’d guitars keep your feet moving as Ferrari sings the meditation. Even the bass takes its turn at carrying the melody in this uplifting hallucination of a track.

‘Mystic Chords of Memory’ keeps funk close to its centre, though its guitar voice has a sharper temper. The title offers the suggestion of remembrance, while the playing refuses to settle into anything soft or sleepy. Rhythm presses onwards, strings bite at its edges, and the track begins to show how Ferrari’s vocal delivery remains meditative in the spaces between the powerful guitar riffs that growl angrily one minute then become exultant the next. I need to keep reminding myself this is one guy making this wall of sound.

With ‘Oyob’, percussion and rock and roll guitar speak with the same urgency. Ferrari sees the song as sitting somewhere between a pagan ritual and a classic rock track, and that pairing gives it its character. There is ceremony in the repetition and swagger in the guitar, a satisfying sense of gathering around an idea and pushing it until it sparks. The drums carve out a tribal rhythm that transport you to a temple somewhere in the Amazon rainforest. What makes this one stand out is the space everything gets. Drums are the constant but vocal, guitar and bass all get their moment to shine.

The record takes a longer breath on ‘In The Solstice Sun’. Built around gentle drone music before turning towards a freer release, it opens a wider emotional space in the album. Ferrari links the song to the corruptibility of human beings and to the unruly thought of everyone abandoning restraint for a day. The opening section allows that idea to develop slowly before contemplation gives way to a grin, and the track finds pleasure in letting the rules loosen for a little while. This becomes one funky number and will have you moving!

‘Sound Mirrors’ works from a beautifully simple premise, two sounds reflecting one another so that echoes from earlier and later moments appear together. Coming after the release of ‘In The Solstice Sun’, it feels like a point of recalibration. The song lets repetition turn reflective, drawing your attention to how a sound changes when it returns in a different setting. Past and future seem to share the same room for six minutes, while Ferrari keeps the rhythm present enough to hold the album’s sense of movement.

A lovely thread of continuity runs through ‘Mokushō’. Its earliest ideas date back to material Ferrari noted down around the first Upupayāma album, before returning to those fragments for Honesty Flowers. The song arrives with the calm assurance of something that has waited for its proper moment. Ferrari associates it with waking in rural Japan, and its eight minutes possess the measured patience of a morning beginning slowly, with light entering a familiar room and a new day coming into focus.

Another piece with roots in an earlier period, ‘Old Sky, Wandering Clouds’ reaches back to the time between Ferrari’s first and second records. His image for the track is night rain followed by trees dripping in the early morning, with happiness quietly settling in. That feeling suits its place late in the album. After so much motion, the song allows space for contentment, carrying the pleasure of standing still after travelling far enough to feel the distance in your bones.

My album highlight comes next ‘Yuya’ condenses the rhythmic spirit of Honesty Flowers into one direct, dancing piece. Ferrari conceives it as a ritual dance, and it arrives with the sense of a circle widening as new feet join in. There is undiluted joy here, expressed through repetition and motion, with the guitars repeated circular riff playing nicely with the syncopated drumming. I love how the song dips in and out but it’s when it comes back that you are lifted and can’t help but dance! By this stage the record has made a communal place of its rhythms, and ‘Yuya’ brings you into the middle of it.

‘Baobab’ is bursting with character. Ferrari has explained that the song began on acoustic guitar, before a sitar line suggested “a group of misfits on an old caravan” That image gives the song a playful, rough-hewn gait, as a travelling party of wanderers bumps along with little need to arrive anywhere quickly. Electric guitar adds another voice to the tale, and its brief running time makes the whole thing feel like a joyful scene glimpsed from the roadside, loud with friendship and the happiness of carrying on. This one is a lot of fun.

The closing ‘Morning Temple’ arrives as the album’s first clear light after the nighttime rituals, rain and roaming paths that have preceded it. Ferrari frames the song as the feeling of waking with the knowledge that something wonderful is going to happen, and it provides a fitting goodbye. The record has spent its time following rhythm into unfamiliar forests, wooded paths and travelling celebrations. Here it opens the door onto a beautiful morning leaving you refreshed, curious and ready to start again.

By the time Honesty Flowers finishes, the strongest impression is of Ferrari allowing rhythm to write across every instrument he touches. Guitars, sitar, flute, keys and percussion become part of the same restless language, carrying one musician’s nighttime experiments into scenes that feel shared and alive. When I first met Upupayāma through Mount Elephant, I found a record that took me far from home. This fourth album stays with you for longer and asks more of your body, your patience and your willingness to follow an idea without demanding a fixed destination. This record has brought me so many happy moments these last few weeks. Ferrari has planted honesty in the rhythm, and these flowers keep opening wherever your feet decide to go.

Honesty Flowers is out now via Fuzz Club. You can check it out over on the Upupayāma Bandcamp page.

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