In 2021, Andrea Cota pressed record on a portable recorder somewhere on Lake Titicaca, among the floating reed islands of the Uros people. Then he flew back to Rome, dropped the files into a folder, and left them there for four years.

He was not waiting for inspiration. He just was not ready. At first, the recordings belonged to the trip. Later, they started to carry something more personal. Cota had first travelled to the Andes almost twenty years earlier, alone and backpacking in his mid-twenties, trying to work out who he was away from home. Going back in 2021 brought that earlier journey back into view. The recordings stayed with him differently because of that.

The four tracks that became Semillas, released on 30 January via Latinambient, the new label founded and curated by Populous, came out of that process. There is an ayahuasca ceremony recorded with the curanderos’ permission in the Pacaya Samiria reserve, sound from Lake Titicaca, rain on the mountain road to Machu Picchu. And an Andean textile with oversized painted eyes that later gave one track its title. None of this is there as decoration or exotic colour. These are the materials the record is built from. Working with Fake Mantra (Matteo Costanzo) helped Cota shape them into finished tracks, especially “Ayawaska” and “Uros”.

Under the Mondocane name, Cota has spent years releasing music on labels including Ivreatronic, Cosmovision Records, Tropicantesimo and Kośa. His DJ-sets move through percussive and psychedelic territory, with less interest in fixed tempo than in how a night develops. Semillas is his most personal release so far. It is also the clearest example of how he works: some material needs time before it shows you what it can become.

We asked him to walk us through it…

“Semillas” means “seeds” in Spanish, a word that evokes latency, potential, growth. You’ve said the title came to you while reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. What was it about that book and that moment that triggered the right association for this project?

Reading it, I was struck by a very simple idea: works aren’t forced, they’re cultivated. I’d had these sounds sitting on my hard drive for years, and I’d been working with them very slowly, like something developing beneath the surface. When I came across that metaphor of seeds, I realised it described exactly what I often find myself doing when I travel: being a kind of musical botanist, searching for material that might germinate. I chose it as the title because I recognised the nature of the project in it.

The EP grew from field recordings captured during a trip to Peru in 2021. What first drew you to Peru, and what brought you back, and how did the country strike you deeply enough to inspire an EP?

The Andes were one of my first backpacking trips, solo, in the mid-2000s. The kind of trip where you’re trying to figure out who you are outside your own context. Going back in 2021 wasn’t just a geographical return. It was a return into my own memory. In a sense, Semillas already begins there: in the confrontation between who I was then and who I’ve become.

Andean culture struck me profoundly, maybe precisely because I encountered it during such a formative phase of my life. And then the Amazon: for me it had always been an almost imaginary place, before it was a real one. When you step inside it, you understand it’s not a symbol. It’s an organism, and it puts you in your place.

I was also struck by the way music is woven into daily life there. It’s not performance; it’s function. It accompanies rituals, celebrations, the phases of life. That changed me more than I realised at the time. I didn’t take a trip to make music. I took a trip, and the music stayed on my skin.

You’ve described Semillas as “a work about memory, not documentation.” That’s an important distinction. Can you tell us more? How does treating field recordings as memories rather than documents change the way you work in the studio?

A documentary records a fact. Memory often transforms it. If I use a field recording as a document, I’m looking for fidelity. If I use it as memory, I accept that it’s deformed, emotional, incomplete. In the studio I didn’t ask myself “what did that sound really sound like?” I asked “where does it take me?” That changes everything: I’m not doing sonic anthropology. I’m working along an emotional trace.

Each of the four tracks is tied to a specific place and a specific emotional state, from the Amazon to Machu Picchu. If Semillas were a map, can you guide us through the geography and the “inner landscape” of each track?

It would be a vertical map.

Ayawaska: the Amazon. It’s deep listening, the loss of control. Immersion.

Uros: Lake Titicaca. Water, floating, both literal and symbolic. Suspension.

Nawi Kuna and Wayna Kuna are, for me, tracks of return, tied to walking, to altitude, to the physical effort of the path toward Machu Picchu. Torrential rain, kilometres underfoot, mountain roads. They’re about crossing through and coming back.

The single “Uros” is built around a recording made on the floating islands of Lake Titicaca, a sound that sat in your archive for four years before becoming music. What finally pushed you to reopen that file, and does that recording carry the same meaning for you in 2025 as it did in 2021?

There wasn’t a single specific event that made me reopen it. I knew that sooner or later it would become something. If I have to point to a concrete push, it was the collaboration with the producer Fake Mantra. Working with him was fundamental in laying the foundations of the EP. It was partly thanks to him that the file left the archive and truly entered production.

Today the recording carries the same emotional meaning, but a different perspective. Listening back after years is like looking again at a photo from a trip: you recognise that moment, but you’re seeing it with changed eyes. The difference is that you’re not just looking at the photo. You can get your hands on it and rework it. For me, that’s a kind of magic: not freezing a memory, but allowing it to evolve.

One of the EP’s seeds is a recording of an ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon, for which you asked the curanderos’ permission. Working with sounds tied to sacred rituals and Indigenous communities inevitably raises questions of responsibility. How do you navigate the line between homage, appropriation and respect, and does that tension still weigh on you, even in hindsight?

I asked permission to record the ceremony. But permission doesn’t automatically absolve you. The real question is: are you using, exploiting, or are you in dialogue?

In Semillas I never treated those sounds as decoration. They’re not “tribal” textures. They’re the narrative centre. And yes, the tension remains. If it doesn’t weigh on you a little, you’re probably oversimplifying.

You collaborated with Fake Mantra (Matteo Costanzo) on this project, particularly on “Ayawaska” and “Uros.” What did he bring to the table that you couldn’t have reached alone, and how did your working dynamic play out in practice?

Matteo brought critical distance. On Ayawaska and Uros he worked on depth and dynamics. I tended to leave everything rawer. He helped transform intuition into form and gave things greater melodic depth without distorting the origin of the sound.

The artwork by Carlo Alberto Giardina evokes earth and fertility, a kind of visual echo of the title. You’ve also made a mini-documentary to accompany the release. How important is the visual dimension in completing a project’s meaning for you, and what can images do that sound alone cannot?

The artwork works with matter, with earth, in a minimalist way. It’s a conceptual extension of the title, and I found it very well-targeted.

The mini-doc on YouTube is another level entirely. I’d brought a drone on the trip, just for fun. The places were so incredible that the footage I brought back is stunning. I decided to edit it into something that could show the context, to give a sense of the scale of those landscapes.

“Semillas” is released on Latinambient, the new label curated by Populous. What does this home represent for this specific project, and how did the connection with Andrea come about?

I don’t think there could have been a more fitting home for a project like this, one that takes Latin America as its starting point. Latinambient, even though it’s just launched, struck me as a curatorial label. Andrea [Populous] and I have had mutual respect for a long time. When I played him the project, he understood it wasn’t an “ethnic” record. It was a work about memory. That understanding was decisive. I was flattered that he chose it for his label.

Your music has found a home on a remarkable range of labels, from Ivreatronic to Cosmovision Records, Tropicantesimo, Kośa and many others, each with its own sonic identity. How do you move between these different contexts, and what’s the thread that holds them together for you?

The thread is simple for me: rhythm and sound as trance, not as function. Whether it’s more club or more ambient, more weird or more minimal, the context changes, but the obsession is the same: to bring the listener into an altered state. If a project doesn’t carry that tension, I don’t release it.

You live in Rome, a city with a particular relationship to the underground. How does the Roman scene, its energies, its limitations, its communities, shape the way you work, both as an artist and as a cultural agitator?

Rome is contradictory. A capital city, but also steeped in underground culture. There’s incredible energy, but fragile structures. You have to invent spaces, networks, opportunities.

That’s made me less comfortable but more receptive. As an artist and cultural agitator, I’ve learned that you can’t wait for the ideal ecosystem. You build it, even in small steps. In Rome you learn to make things happen even when there’s no ready-made structure. And that’s a training ground.

You wear many “hats”: DJ, producer, composer, musician. How do these roles feed each other creatively, and is there one you identify with most, or do you need all of them to stay in balance?

You’ve hit on the point. Up to now, having several parallel activities has kept me in balance. DJing keeps me in the present; producing lets me dig deeper; being a musician reminds me where it all started.

You’ve described your approach to DJing as “unconventional clubbing,” psychedelic, percussive trajectories that don’t depend on BPM, sometimes hypnotic, sometimes more like a “wake-up call.” What does that mean in practice when you play, and how would you describe a Mondocane set to someone who’s never seen you behind the decks?

I’m very attuned to the context I’m playing in. It’s not really about BPM. I start from a trajectory. I’m interested in creating a state, not in demonstrating genre coherence.

I might start slow, percussive, almost hypnotic, and then open out toward something more frontal. Or do the opposite. It depends on the space, the time of night, the people.

A Mondocane set isn’t linear. Sometimes it’s ritual, sometimes physical, sometimes almost contemplative. What matters to me is that whoever’s dancing feels like they’re passing through something, not just consuming tracks.

Your work is often described with labels like “tribal electronic,” “global hybrid,” “multicultural sounds of the urban jungle.” How do you relate to these definitions, and to the much-debated term “world music,” which is hard to avoid but also frequently criticised?

Labels are useful for orientation, but I’ve always enjoyed inventing new ones. “World music” is problematic because it presupposes a centre and an elsewhere. I don’t feel at the centre of anything. I work with sounds that have transformed me. If they become mere aesthetics, that’s a problem.

What seeds are you planting now? After Semillas, where do you imagine Mondocane is headed, sonically, geographically, and perhaps also inwardly?

I’m already producing new music, but it doesn’t have a clear direction yet. And that’s fine.

In recent years I’ve gathered a lot: trips, residencies, encounters, sounds recorded in different contexts. Right now I’m letting all of that settle.

More than a precise geography, I feel a pull: to go even deeper and strip away the superfluous, to understand what remains if I pare the compositions back a little.

The seeds are underground now. I don’t yet know what kind of plant they’ll become.

Mondocane’s Semillas was released on Latinambient on 30 January
You can listen to it and purchase your copy HERE

Cover Photo ©: Agnese Zingaretti