Brass Menažeri met Mr. Lif way back in December of 2010, when mad genius Devon Leger thought--unlike anyone else in the world--that Balkan brass would make a good backdrop for hip hop. So he invited us all to meet and collaborate in the Seattle Folk Festival. We sent a swath of largely fruitless emails, flew to Seattle, and had a single rehearsal in a puddly coffin factory, with a borrowed Crate bass guitar amp for Lif's vocals.

We didn't get electrocuted, somehow, and thus we didn't make use of the factory's usual product. Instead we created a collaboration method based on live remixing the band, slicing and rearranging our repertoire on cue, muting and soloing sections of the band & looping sections willy nilly, like a DJ might if they held dictatorial control over ten people, instead of Ableton Live. You weren't there, but it was awesome. We loved it & rocked it. We decided to make a record, raised money from friends & faithful strangers, recorded a lot of music, the band disbanded, some people loved and lost, others simply waited, we composed & recorded & edited & re-recorded (in three different countries) & cut & recut & recomposed (& decomposed a bit--happens to us all), and now only seven years later, you're holding this thing in your I-wouldn't-say-grubby-exactly hands, praise the laud.

Mr. Lif has been a mainstay of the hip-hop underground. A 9-time Boston Music Award winner, Lif has been featured on MTV, Rolling Stone, SPIN, The NY Times, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, and XXL, among others. Lif has toured over 20 countries as a soloist, and has collaborated with a slate of critically acclaimed musicians including Aesop Rock, Cut Chemist, The Polish Ambassador, Galactic, Chali 2na, Jedi Mind Tricks, El-P, DJ Q-Bert, Del the Funkee Homosapien, Murs, and DJ Krush.