Mateo y Las Manos Pesadas

Mateo y Las Manos Pesadas is a fusion of minstrel on the edge with Latin American percussion and passion. The songs and performance are a chronicle of a spiritual and musical journey. Most often armed with only an acoustic guitar, Mateo is not a pastoral troubadour-though his music can be gentle and conversational- more often it cuts a raw, jagged edge; intense and white hot. Hailing from Colorado, and traveling extensively throughout Latin America, this idea was born. 

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Mateo's live performances, solo and with his hard-hitting aggregation of players, are cathartic experiences, balancing whimsical narrative with the western parable, pounding polemics with personality, humor and vision. "The live performance in me is like a beast," laughs Mateo, "When I am playing music, even if only a one person is listening in some tiny bar, it's such an honor to be up there; it does me a world of good."

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Mateo's dizzying output of songs has been recorded in marathon solo performances in studios, in candid, inspired takes, with only his guitar, voice and harmonica framing the lyrics. This project masterfully produced by Alfred Gomez Jr. (a Venezuelan producer and artist), and brought together by Sound Engineer Eduardo Lopez (a Venezuelan with master skills at the board), the collective roar of bass, percussion, horns, keyboards, and guitars become a mighty wave, with Mateo's pirate musings riding the crest of a cross-cultural sonic surf.

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The tracks to come are a result of a session recorded at White Lemon Studios in Bogota, Colombia. Our hope is that the joy, fun, passion and percussion resonate and are a successful bridge of the best aspects of the Western US and South America.