Mammo Is Ready to Talk

An interview with the mysterious Amsterdam-based producer, who for the first time shares details about his personal life, his musical evolution and the "expanded universe" he's sought to create.

What do you know about Mammo? Even within the most cultured corners of electronic music, the most common answer to that question is probably “Not much.” Although the Amsterdam-based artist has been releasing music at a steady clip since 2020, he’s purposely kept a low profile, to a point where he not only actively shies away from self-promotion, but has further muddied the waters by operating under a slew of perplexing aliases (e.g. A∞x, CoA-A, 2301, 2302, 2401, 2501) and starting up no fewer than four different labels—Nduja, Heaven Smile, Puddlerunner and E35.

In a time when even supposedly “underground” music culture tends to spell out every detail of an artist’s backstory and specifically explain the underlying narrative behind each new release, Mammo has gone in the completely opposite direction, revealing only scraps of information about both himself and the records he makes. (Those records, by the way, sit in an enticingly hypnotic space somewhere between ambient, house and techno.) It was less than a year ago that he first shared a photo of himself online, and while his budding relationship with the hotly tipped Short Span label—which released last year’s acclaimed General Patterns and will next week be dropping a new triple-vinyl LP called Lateral—has introduced a tiny bit of orthodoxy to the Mammo universe, the guy remains an enigma. (One of the few personal details he’s shared is that his given name is Fabiano, and last year he adopted that moniker for an ambient-oriented full-length called Landmarks.)

Given the mystery surrounding Mammo, I figured an interview was probably a longshot, but with a growing level of excitement around Lateral (and pretty much everything the Short Span label is doing right now), I decided to try my luck and put in a request. Much to my surprise, he not only accepted the invitation, but as I came to find out over the course of a long call last week, he’s actually a relatively open book.

Going into the conversation, I admittedly had little information to work with. Mammo had only done one interview before, and it wasn’t published online, which meant that my research mostly consisted of trawling through his labyrinthine catalog and parsing what information I could from the cryptic texts he’s shared over the years, both on Instagram and alongside his many releases. As such, our interview essentially began with Mammo 101, diving into his family life and his musical upbringing. Little by little, however, we delved into his craft—and in the process, got to the bottom of everything from his unusual naming conventions to his production methodologies. Along the way, he also shared his thoughts on contemporary music journalism, the current hype around dub techno—a genre he’s often reductively lumped in with—and his fruitful relationship with Short Span.

Not every secret was shared—Mammo still wants to keep a few things to himself—but a whole lot of ground was covered, and what became clear is that behind all the names, all the labels, all the stylistic shifts and all of the seeming elusiveness lies an artist who’s not just thoughtful, but very intentional about everything he does. After talking to him, the Mammo universe no longer felt like such a mystery, but it’s still a place that I—and, I’m guessing, many other people—will be eager to inhabit and explore further.