Cloudland Canyon - Silver Tongued Sisyphus [111LP]
Recorded in Brooklyn, Germany, and Memphis, Silver Tongued Sisyphus followed Cloudland Canyon's well-received Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004. The album's secular calls to prayer with humming, looping, and loping ambient passages are interspersed with bursting rhythmic energy and agitated guitar lines.
Pulling influences from the foggy ether of generations past, the band stakes their claim to the shadows of the cult musical culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s German underground scene. Live shows sound like unauthorized soundtracks to netherworld versions of The Swimmer or Scorceror.
Originally released on vinyl in an edition of 96 copies on Germany's Meudiamorte label, Silver Tongued Sisyphus is now available once again.
Cloudland Canyon / Lichens - Exterminating Angel [051962]
Cloudland Canyon / Lichens - Exterminating Angel [051962LP]
This collaboration between the mellow, Memphis-meets-Germany duo of Kip Uhlhorn and Simon Wojan (a.k.a. Cloudland Canyon) and Chicago's great rock 'n' roll concierge and knower-of-mystics Mr. Robert Lowe (a.k.a. Lichens) was born on a trip to the West Coast of the United States a few years ago.
Exterminating Angel's single 30-minute track uses voice, guitar, samplers, and ARP synthesizer. You've heard of the unmade science fiction epic whose would-be director proposed using different big-name progressive bands to perform a soundtrack for specific planets used in the script; here then are the sounds accompanying a spacecraft that's a combination Death Star and Taco Bell from the 1970s filled with cement Mayan temples and pyramids populated by large, snappily dressed reptilian beings. Every so often a bell goes off to break the spell and presents convincing evidence of this record's special journey.