As slaved-over as the songs on Pick a Piper’s eponymous debut are, band mastermind and admitted studio perfectionist Brad Weber is happy to take a more easygoing approach when performing them live.

“We’re trying to improvise and be spontaneous a lot,” says the Ontario native, who might be best known as the drummer for Caribou, speaking from a Calgary tour stop. “As we go along, and get more and more comfortable with our live setup, we’re trying to open up more and more room. It’s been a huge work in progress and it’s taken a while to get things to where we are really happy with the show. We don’t want to play songs exactly as they are on the record. We’re trying to have moments where we freak out.”

From that statement, one might rightly infer that Pick a Piper didn’t start out as the kind of all-consuming project where the band’s members practise four nights a week, and play live the other three. Instead, Weber found himself messing around with loops and samples while on tour with Caribou. Eventually, he began looking for ideas from old friends Angus Fraser and Dan Roberts, both of whom he’d played with in bands dating back to high school. Their contributions would eventually be thrown into the mix and, after much messing around and manipulation, end up evolving into Pick a Piper, the mission of which is to bridge dance-inspired beats with an organic strain of world-music–saturated pop. The key word is eventually.

“I’m not very quick at finishing songs,” Weber notes. “Some people can finish a track in an afternoon. Most things take a few months for me. It’s a process where I do something for a bit and then let a song simmer for a while, then come back to it. Usually I’ll come up with almost like a drum riff for a percussion idea, and then I’ll bring it to the other guys. Sometimes me and Angus will put something together, sometimes me and Dan. Then it’s up to me to pick through them to see what I like best and chop them up to make them different, kind of like slicing and dicing.”

The results make Pick a Piper a great mixtape for like-minded alchemists such as El Guincho and Panda Bear. The mashup tune “Cinders and Dust” matches a sounds-of-Soweto drum pattern to squelchy ’90s-vintage programmed beats and icy out-of-the-’80s synths. More worldly is “Once Were Leaves”, where Mexican-cantina guitar flourishes are blended with vocals that fall halfway between Laurie Anderson and Sufjan Stevens. “Zenaida” is pop music as reimagined in the hookah dens of the Middle East, while “South to Polynesia” gives proggy electronica a free-jazz injection.

Live, Pick a Piper re-creates the songs with Weber playing full drums, and Fraser and Roberts handling partial kits as well as synths, laptops, and vocals, all the while doing whatever the hell they please when it comes to deviating from the script.

“I don’t have an interest in making music that sounds like one certain thing,” Weber says with a laugh. “I could never be commissioned to make music for a TV show or movie, because I’d get started on it, and then it would go in some completely different direction.”