A Wild Portrait of a Musical Duo

It is just about as rare for us to hear from agents as it is to receive reference images in the form of MS Paint doodles, but both things happened with this commission order for the musical duo Lamaus.

Denitsa Trandeva was commissioned to create this illustration in her signature Character Illustration style. We love the piece so much, it had us dying to learn more about the people and music behind it. Luckily, the Lamaus duo happily obliged.

Backstory Behind the Piece – Q&A with Lamaus

ArtCorgi (AC): For how long has Lamaus existed?

Lamaus (L): I’d say since about the summer of 2010. Back then we had little in the way of instruments and even less any idea what we were doing. All we had was a bass guitar, and old acoustic guitar with two strings missing, and a cellphone to record on.

AC: Into what musical genre does your music fit the best?

L: I almost don’t want to say ‘free improvisation’, because improvisation implies a certain level of skill, but yeah, that, I guess. We don’t go in with a plan. We just doodle around nonsensically and hope that the result is the next pop radio hit. No luck so far. Most people who hear it describe it as ‘noise’. Noise is a genre too.

AC: What inspires your music?

L: Our influences are interesting because both members come from opposite ends of the music spectrum. We both have completely different and conflicting music tastes and ideas. The one known as “Zach” listens mostly to rock music, and as such contributes actual riffs and chord progressions into the ‘songs’ (that’s, uh, the term we like to use). The one known as “Kyle” just wants to make free jazz most of the time, or deranged spoken word / storytelling pieces. What truly inspires us to make music, though? Boredom, I guess.

AC: Where can folks learn more about your work?

They really shouldn’t, but if they must, we have a Bandcamp page that has all of our albums available to stream and download (for free of course – nobody would or should pay for this). We also have a Facebook page. It’s pretty much only used to post potential song titles that we think of so that we don’t forget them. We are far from anything special. Do not get hyped.

-Lamaus