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Bearded's Ben Wood interviews Lay Llamas before their headline show at Shacklewell Arms:
Like label mates Goat, Italy’s Lay Llamas combine spacey grooves, Afro-futurism and a nice line in self-mythologising. Currently touring the UK in support of the mysterious Swedes/Sicilian duo Nicola Gunta (founder, live bassist) and Goiele Valenti (lyricist, singer) discuss debut album Ostro and their intriguing stew of influences.
The Lay Llamas love a good yarn. They claim to be space travellers from a Nigerian tribe, dedicated to the search for a higher consciousness. But anyone expecting their spacey krautrock grooves to originate from a band of addled longhairs are in for a shock. In person, the band’s Sicilian founder and bassist Nicola Gunta and lyricist and frontman Gioele Valenti are young, fresh-faced, charming and enthusiastic - a long way from anyone’s stereotype of a psychedelic outfit.
Nicola explains that the band’s fondness for pagan, magical, ritualistic imagery isn’t a po-faced statement but an attempt to synthesise all their favourite influences into an entertaining whole: “We aren’t talking about real history or ethnomusicology...
Read the full interview here: Bearded
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