Larry Gus (GR)

Inspired by the rural environment of his hometown, multi-instumentalist, singer and producer Panagiotis Melidis (born in Veria, Imathia, Greece) started to write music as Larry Gus* in 2006, soon after the early demise of his previous band Ginger (a bass and drums duo with a sound adjacent to the early 00s Providence scene, paired with HipHop overtones). Initially he spent some time composing production music, and later on he got his name due to some intense and chaotic live performances. What he kept from his first band were the primitive aesthetics of groove based music, along with an obsession for late 60’s / early 70’s free-jazz. But he went on and combined them with sample-based ethics and crystal clear psychedelic pop melodies, all merged into an infinitely dense amount of layers and polyrhythms. His first album proper, Stitches was released in 2009 for Greek HipHop label Cast-A-Blast and soon after that he resided for a year at the Music Technology Group in Barcelona (Reactable, Freesound) as an intern and postgraduate student. Then he relocated back to Veria to work on his next project, Years Not Living, an album directly inspired by Georges Perec’s 1978 book Life: A Users Manual and Lucio Battisti’s 1974 album Anima Latina. The YNL sessions had 85 songs as a result, and the whole process, set amidst financial crisis’ Greece was documented and will be part of the feature film My Friend Larry Gus (directed by Vasilis Katsoupis), released in 2013. Meanwhile, among many remixes, he also put out the mini-album 24 Beats on the Lefse Records imprint, Waaga. Most recently, he released Silent Congas via DFA Records, a 9 song taster of the YNL material, with the actual Years Not Living LP coming up early 2013 on DFA. So far he has performed at various venues around the world, and has also participated at the 2nd Athens Biennial and 2nd Nuit Blanche à Metz. Panagiotis currently lives and works in Milano, Italy, still carrying certain obsessions with Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Lucio Battisti, Woody Allen and Otis Jackson Jr. *larry gus = λάρυγγας (larigas): greek for larynx