Cloudland Canyon

Kip Uhlhorn has trekked from Knoxville to Brooklyn to Germany and beyond, but he’s glad to be back home in Memphis. The Germantown native moved to Knoxville in 1997 to attend the University of Tennessee. There he found himself fronting local semi-legendary hardcore band the Red Scare alongside moved-away-but-now-they’re-back locals Matt Hall (late of New Brutalism) and Abigail Wintker (the XX factor of Three Man Band), as well as the current Rhode Island-dwelling John Asher.  Uhlhorn left for New York in 2000, falling in with Vice Records recording artists Panthers, who caused a small stir during the early-’00s’ Brooklyn guitar-band craze.

That group had a higher profile than either Red Scare or his latest project, Cloudland Canyon, but Uhlhorn seems more relieved than anything that he left the band and, later, New York to return to Memphis in 2006. In fact, when asked of his former band’s current status, Uhlhorn is uncertain.

“I heard they broke up. I should know, but I don’t,” he says. “Panthers was a weird deal, kind of an experiment. It started for fun, but every band in New York was being signed to a major, and then it was almost like a job. I felt kind of like a sideman.”

While on a European tour with a friend’s band in 2002, Uhlhorn met German musician Simon Wojan, and the two discovered they had similar music interests. Wojan visited the United States later that year, recording with Uhlhorn in Brooklyn, thus beginning the collaboration that would become Cloudland Canyon.

Their first album, Requiems der Natur, was released in 2006, the result of the initial recording session followed by two years of overseas track-trading between the two. It’s a dense, dizzying album full of hypnotic drones and lush ambient textures, the product of many hours spent layering and mixing vocals, analog synths, treated guitars and Lord-knows-what else. The release received favorable reviews from many camps, drawing comparisons to Krautrock groups such as Popol Vuh, Cluster and Ash Ra Temple.

An EP and collaboration with Robert Lowe’s Lichens followed, received more comparisons to Krautrock, and the few advance reviews of their new album, Lie in Light, have kept with the trend of painting the pair as Krautophiles. Uhlhorn doesn’t deny Cloudland’s obvious debt to those groups, but he thinks that aspect of their music has been overplayed.

“We get that every record,” he explains. “Obviously we’re influenced by it, but it’s furthest from what we’re trying to achieve now. This record, I think, is poppy. We actually sing a lot on it. It became way poppier than I thought it would. I mean, I think the vocals on ‘White Woman’ sound like the Bee Gees.”

Still, the album does open with a song called “Krautwerk,” and when I mention to Uhlhorn it sounds like a playful cover of Faust’s semi-tongue-in-cheek “Krautrock,” he laughs.

“That song was named as a sort of joke. In all seriousness, there was a point in time when we liked that stuff. But when I met Simon, I was really into Krautrock, and he’d never heard it. Germans look at those groups like we look at Supertramp. He’s classically trained, and most of it he’d never heard. It was interesting watching him catch up.”

Has it become annoying to constantly read those comparisons?

“Who cares, really,” is his immediate reply, followed closely by, “I’ll tell you what’s really annoying — that review in the new Wire. We have a lot of respect for that magazine, and they’ve been really good to us, but in the review of the new album, they said they liked the first track — which is the most Krautrock thing on there — then said the rest of the album was too Krautrock-y! So we’re never gonna get away from that. But most music journalism is just rewriting the press sheet anyway.”

Though most lay-listeners wouldn’t describe Lie in Light as a pop record, there are more traditional song structures present, and those layered vocals from Wojan and Uhlhorn (with assistance from Uhlhorn’s wife, Kelly) do soften some of the harder edges of their music. There seems to be a focus and directness present that was somewhat missing from the three-years-in-the-making debut, and Uhlhorn credits that, in large part, to the time he and Wojan were able to spend together making the album.

“This is the first time we’ve recorded a record together,” he says. “And [our label] Kranky has been flexible with us. We spent six weeks at my house, and I mean working all day and all night. We recorded a lot in Germany, too, in Simon’s practice space, which is this underground bunker that was the most dark and depressing place of all time. You know those hatches that are on submarines? You had to enter it through one of those and climb down in it.”

A number of contributors augmented Uhlhorn and Wojan’s sounds on Lie In Light (including Memphis native and current Knoxville resident Adam Ewing of Mountains of Moss, who is a longtime friend of Uhlhorn), and for the tour, friends Josh Anzano of Titan, Jerry Fuchs of !!! and the Juan McLean will assist the two core band members.

 “It’s the first time Simon and I are playing actual songs live,” says Uhlhorn. “It’s always a hassle to tour, ’cause we both play like nine instruments and have to keep switching off.”

Hassles and annoying music journalists aside, Uhlhorn seems pretty happy with his current project and grateful for his collaboration with Wojan and the freedom a label like Kranky gives them.

“I stand 100 percent behind what we’re doing,” he says. “It’s definitely nice to be in a band you’re psyched about.”

Cloudland Canyon w/ Black Sarah
Saturday, April 26
Pilot Light (106 E. Jackson Ave.) /
9 p.m. / $5