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To be released on CD, cassette and digitally on August 12th, 2025. CD packaged in 4-panel gatefold digipak. Tape is a C76 on a windowless orange shell with black imprints, packaged with a 2-sided 4-panel J-Card. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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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?
Mondo Lava’s palette of acoustic and electronic instruments juxtaposes gloriously chintzy multi-tracked melodic spirals from an arsenal of decades-old Casio keyboards with organic beats performed on hand percussion, as peals of guitar and saxophone bubble out of the cauldron in particularly climactic passages. The band’s hybridized aesthetic shares DNA with Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air as much as the wave of late-’00s zoned-out underground experimental electronic artists like Sun Araw, Blues Control, and Skaters, with keyboards swirling together into rapid-fire cascades over a network of congas, tumbas, pandeiros, shakers, and claves. Utero Dei presents a suite-like journey that weaves tracks together even as they transition between differing fidelities, instrumentations, and moods. While each track dials into its own bespoke little world with bold mixing decisions that blast certain instruments into the red and soak the entire spread in analog warmth, the album’s sum total offers a continuous slow-burning narrative with a natural flow. Chubby kick drums and synth basslines bounce through the music with wall-shaking low end. Washed out keyboard melodies that sound like they were recorded underwater share space with the brittle clang of bone dry Casio chords. Mondo Lava segue into passages of lo-fi 50s skiffle pop with jangly guitar riffs saturated with hiss and grind their way through carnivalesque workouts that sound like the music that would play from a wind-up box before the toy monkey pops out. Drawing power from its willful messiness as much as its progressive forward motion, teeming with jovial one-off synth squeaks and sudden twists in mood and atmosphere, the duo’s ramshackle instrumental music never loses sight of its sense of humor and mischief.
Speaking about the themes behind Utero Dei, James Ketchum explains: “In 2020, I moved to Spain with my family to a city that features a prominent portion of the Camino de Santiago. I began daydreaming about performing a musical pilgrimage on the Camino, playing songs in the churches and cathedrals along the way. I composed a number of songs for this album as potential organ songs to be played in a cathedral. However; I have no idea how to organize getting to play the organ in a church, let alone many churches throughout the North of Spain, so I settled on the project as being nothing more than a fantasy. So this album is a phantasm pilgrimage, and I like to think that whenever people listen to it, they are going on their own internal pilgrimage.”
