The current retrowave, spanning 8-bit microcomputers, cassette mulch and lo-fi outsider pop occasionally provokes the idea that even supposedly obsolete technologies still hold unexplored potential.Listeners drawn to the creative possibilities within outdated formats might discover in Utero Dei a rich, underappreciated document. After eleven years and five albums, the duo known as Mondo Lava continue to construct one of the most distinctive psychedelic soundworlds in the lo-fi underground.
Rather than present a tidy tracklist, Utero Dei unfolds like a topographic map. Guitars and keyboards saturate until they resemble synthesizers, evoking a degraded fidelity that mirrors the soft static of memory. Beneath a heavy dose of hiss and warble, the music reveals a depth of musicianship with hand-played percussion, spiralling melodies and improvisational flow. These qualities often go unnoticed in lo-fi scenes that favour sample-based construction, which Mondo Lava also have within their process and DNA. They do standout uniquely as a lo-fi band with a distinctive and engaging approach. Recorded straight to cassette, the album’s sound feels tactile and time-warped.
Many of the synth lines carry a devotional energy, blending Tangerine Dream-like reveries with the ecclesiastical shimmer of John Tavener. The album deliberately explores the concept of pilgrimage, combining a sense of holiness with cybernetic undertones. Through their musical inventiveness, Mondo Lava conjure a sprawling, rhizomatic journey across this 75-minute album. Despite its broad eclecticism it feels deep and explorative rather than messy, the album maintains the cohesion of a Gene Wolfe science-fantasy novel, fusing ancient and futuristic, far into the future folk.
Latter track ‘Village Idiot Walking Around With A Flower Balanced On His Nose’ offers post-internet holy minimalism, like a dream pop ode to a lost Geocities shrine, running on a Windows 98 PC in an Amazonian fallout shelter. ‘Golem Boogie’ channels a different energy with an acid soaked version of ‘La Bamba’. After a few listens, the playfulness of styles within Utero Dei feels like a collection of gathered symbols and dream memorabilia.
Despite their musical skill, Mondo Lava rely on texture-as-composition, using cassette compression not as an effect but as a core structural element. Track transitions blur into surreal vignettes of incidental muzak, sci-fi jazz and Afro-Latin devotional grooves. Utero Dei is completed by its occasional feeling of storytelling and the cinematic, Kurt Weill’s cabaret, breakfast television themes and late-night B-movie phantasmagoria. The results suggest psych rock filtered through Burroughs, Gysin and Dilloway, a cracked collage that performs séance as much as satire.
The album follows a strange unconscious logic. Tracks shift from no wave shadow chug to moments of profound serenity, such as ‘Brass Fields’, or from faux skiffle to organ-fried meditation. Rather than just experimenting with genre conventions, Utero Dei melts them together until only the space between them, the storytelling and the atmosphere remain.
Utero Dei does not offer pastiche but maps a kind of sonic psychogeography, a mutant zone of devotional hallucination, imaginary pop and radiant ruin.
