Merge Records
2005
CoLAB
About This Album
Kurt Wagner and his many and various compatriots in Lambchop have earned a well-deserved reputation as artists willing to take a chance and bend even their own self-imposed rules, but Wagner takes his music into a place most of his fans probably never expected on this EP. Hands off Cuba are a two-man electronic ensemble comprised of Ryan Norris and Scott Martin; like Wagner, they're musical renegades in Nashville, a city not always friendly to the sonically adventurous, and Wagner asked them if they'd be willing to team up for a recording project. For CoLAB, Hands off Cuba participated in the arrangement and recording of a new Lambchop tune, "Prepared," and then took elements from the sessions (and other Lambchop material) and fashioned them into three new pieces. "Prepared" is a simple but lovely song that wouldn't be out of place on Is a Woman, but the other three cuts are a different kettle of fish, with Norris and Martin doing a fairly radical slice-and-splice number on Wagner's music, fashioning new melodic structures from the pieces, adding a variety of beats and sound effects, and processing organic musical sounds into otherworldly soundscapes.
Track List (try tracks 1,2 and 3)

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