Cloudland Canyon: Silver Tongued Sisyphus
kranky

Cloudland Canyon's spectacularly-titled EP, Silver Tongued Sisyphus, offers a foretaste of the alchemical magic no doubt to come on the duo's upcoming kranky full-length (scheduled for an early 2008 release). A natural follow-up to its Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004 album, the EP finds Kip Uhlhorn and Simon Wojan surrendering to their music's hallucinatory pull in two trippy, long-form excursions. “Dambala” opens the set in a relentlessly churning state of hot-wired, serpentine restlessness, with looping rhythms intensifying and decompressing as they're shattered by guitar ruptures and cathedralesque organ flourishes; during its second half, “Dambala” metamorphosizes into a synthesizer-driven mix of blinding patterns and soaring string tones equally rooted in German Krautrock and classical Minimalism. The title piece awakens slowly with sparkling glissandi patterns but quickly works up a propulsive steam of mellotron haze, drums, and chanted vocals. The second piece is the more disorienting and feverish of the two, and rather more unhinged and psychedelic. The material here bodes well for what one anticipates will be an even more dizzying and transporting full-length.

October 2007