Mondo Lava - Utero Dei - New Cassette 2025 Hausu Mountain Tape - Electronic / Psychedelic / Experimental / Dub

James Ketchum and Leon Hu record under the name Mondo Lava. Their music channels the prismatic psych-pop of 1970s tropicália and compositional frameworks from dub, free jazz, and new age music into the hazy atmospheres and the homespun production quality of lo-fi straight-to-cassette recording in the spirit of the US experimental underground. With band spearhead Ketchum living in Pamplona, Spain and Hu residing in Davis, California where the band was formed, their project which has existed in various forms since 2006 blesses the world with new material whenever Ketchum and his collaborators flesh out a new program of beautifully fried excursions into their humid rainforests of sound. Following 2014’s Parrot Head Cartridge (HAUSMO26) and 2018’s Ogre Heights (HAUSMO77), Mondo Lava returns to Hausu Mountain with the sprawling 75-minute album Utero Dei. While the band has always stretched their releases to mind-altering durations to give their spiraling keyboard lines and hand-performed percussion room to blossom through cycles of ecstatic repetition, Utero Dei sets a new high watermark for their output with its diverse menu of transportive sonic biomes. While the tenets that have defined the project since its inception — the exploitation of tape-deck production quality to otherworldly ends, the freewheeling jouissance of lead-instrument improvisation coupled with the zoned-out potential of loop-based rhythmic foundations — remain firmly intact, Mondo Lava presents Utero Dei as a camp nestled deeper out into the vegetation than ever before. They offer us the aural equivalent of pushing aside giant palm fronds to discover an amusement park waiting for us in the clearing ahead — wooden roller coasters, derelict sideshow game booths, flickering neon signs, all still functioning with no other signs of life around. Who built this here, of all places, and how long ago?