Remember the other week when we took our sanity in our hands and recommended you listen to Lay Llamas’ new single ‘Silver Sun’? A “grainy garage rock” epic, we said, including bits that sounded like Super Furry Animals playing a gig in a rainforest and a saxophonist having paroxysms?
Well, apparently, Lay Llamas mainman Nicola Giunta mustn’t have thought this was wild-ass enough. So the Italian psych-pop maestro got Negra Branca – aka Gnod soundscapist Marlene Ribiero – to hammer away at it for her ‘Red Sun Remix’, and the results are, fittingly, scorch-hot. It opens with some rainforest-at-dawn electronic mating calls, through which ventures an adventurous saxophonist, hunting for rare breeds of insecticide jazz. Then those drone basslines kick in and the whole thing dives deep underwater like a krautrock The Life Aquatic. Is that a school of mephedrone sharks sweeping by? Is that a nagging madsaxjazz fish spraying its poison? And is that a choir of mermaids intoning “red sun, green sun” from a coral reef perch? Or have we had way too much of whatever Ribiero’s on?
Let Giunta explain. “I was so surprised by [Negra Branca’s] different sonic and performing mood compared to her GNOD one. Her layering of female voice melodies on dubby rhythmic patterns mixed with foggy synth sounds, samples and other weird stuff. It reminds me so much of some stuff from the first Lay Llamas debut tape - that same 'space jungle mantra' atmosphere but led by female magic singing. She accelerated that 'space jungle' to land it on a 'space highway'... at lightspeed.”
Well quite. But don’t just take us nutters’ word for it – listen to the track yourself below.
