Despite his successes, first with art rock group Panthers and now with psychedelic drone duo Cloudland Canyon, Kip Uhlhorn never really has taken music seriously. He explains it casually: “Growing up, I almost accidentally went from one band and to another. A couple times I thought I was done playing in bands. Even Cloudland Canyon, we never really thought it’d get outside of making CDs for our friends.” Of Uhlhorn’s better-known project, he says, “When the opportunity came for Panthers to sign with [Vice Records], I said sure, I’ll try it out.”
Contrast Uhlhorn’s modesty with his original reason for playing music in the first place—he wanted to rebel against his mama. The 31-year-old guitarist grew up during hair metal’s prime. His mother taught piano and was naturally unamused by the excesses of Ratt and Poison. “It’s sort of embarrassing to admit,” Uhlhorn says of his early teens. “She made it difficult for me to buy that shit. I tell her that’s why I’ve played music for so long, because it was something so ‘dangerous’.”
Cloudland Canyon is not hair metal. Nor is it dangerous, unless you consider mind-expanding psychedelia to be hazardous to your health. The band owes a debt to 1960s drug culture, though not solely the rock music elements of it. Sun Ra is an influence, but so are a handful of obscure Kraut Rock groups and American acts like the Electric Prunes. On their newest release Lie in Light, Uhlhorn and collaborator Simon Wojan forge a sound that is both ambitious and relaxed. The duo has obviously worked hard, creating layers of analog synths and vibraphone sounds, parade trumpets and harmonized vocal “ahhhhhs” that are as potent in their originality as they are relaxed in their effect on listeners.
Lie in Light was a combination of inspiration and luck. “This is the first [project] we both totally collaborated on,” he says of the new disc, soon to be released on indie heavyweight Kranky. After spending a month in Germany (where Wojan lives), the duo settled in to Uhlhorn’s Memphis home and polished tracks that would comprise the finished product. Much of the result was refined and rehearsed, but other elements, such as the ambient, alien vocal arrangements, were completely new territory for them. Moreover, on Lie in Light, evidence of Uhlhorn’s hair metal past is nowhere to be found. The same can’t be said of disco, however. “We’re into how the Bee Gees harmonized,” Uhlhorn says. “Then we tried some stuff, and realized we could harmonize really well…we wore that shit out.”
-Mark Sanders