Cloudland Canyon: Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004
Tee Pee Records

Impregnate Animal Collective with Oval and spawn like Cloudland Canyon's Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004 might materialize. Indebted to the experimental tradition of ‘70s German electronic music and groups like This Heat, The Dead C, and Ash Ra Temple, Panthers guitarist Kip Uhlhorn and German multi-instrumentalist Simon Wojan generate freaky cauldrons of hallucinogenic noise from improvisations and field recordings. Throughout the 42-minute collection, entranced voices moan and chant amidst peyote-fueled modal masses assembled from arm-wrestling guitar peals, mellotrons, and marimbas. Though the album's material spans three years of studio activity, the actual sessions comprised a week of 12-hour days, with the duo wrenching sounds from as many instruments and computers as were available at the time. Consequently, the forecast is hazy in the extreme, with guitar clicks bleeding into buzzsaw drones, electronic swarms melting into howling organ squalor, and orchestral blare drowning in distorted seas (the pair wisely chose to eschew intervals between the album's ten pieces, thereby intensifying the set's disorientating ambiance). One might imagine Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004 as an album-length distillation of a distressed soul's mental state caught in the psychosis-inducing throes of an 8-hour acid trip while lost in the woods.

June 2006