A production from the Artist Formerly Known As Atom Heart, Uwe Schmidt, the gag on this one is that Los Sampler’s [sic] are a band of Cuban sampler “players”, re-writing traditional Cuban and Afro-Cuban forms on a bunch of low-tech samplers. So what you have is a whole bunch of deliberately degraded and mauled fragments of traditional Cuban music, re-assembled on Schmidt’s hard drive. There are definite songs in there, but with appropriate perversions of the lyrical conventions again. Certainly the only album on which you’re likely to hear someone singing in Spanish about cabling or how much they have warped the particular form for that number. A couple of listens were required before I could really relax into the feel of the music, as its production aesthetic is much more abrasive than Schmidt’s other Latin cut ups as Senor Coconut. While sometimes the source material seemed a little awkwardly at odds with the outcome, I thoroughly recommend Los Sampler’s to anyone interested in something truly novel that will stand up to repeat listens.
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