Motorik beats aside, last year’s U/V Light LP—a solo album essentially—was the first hint that Kip Uhlhorn has pop tendencies lurking beyond the Krautrock curtain of his longtime project Cloudland Canyon. Now back at its helm for next month’s An Arabesque record, Uhlhorn has paired with Panda Bear producer Sonic Boom (see also: Spectrum, Spacemen 3) on such “naive disco” songs as today’s #selftitledpremiere. Available below alongside the album’s previously leaked title track, “Try Faking It” sends a couple guest singers (Erica Azzurri and Lesa Aldridge) spiraling through a cracked space-time continuum of crystalline keys and bubble gun beats.
Here’s what Uhlhorn had to say about it:
Soooo…. I guess my hope was to get arbitrary or serendipitous results and then go back and mess around with it more. I used Ableton’s beat repeater a lot for drum parts made from YouTube MIDI data. Anyway, this was the first time where I tried this method and it seemed to really click. It’s almost like pulling music out of thin air. I really enjoy removing myself from the songwriting as much as possible, or I guess trying to work as intuitively or maybe even in a manner not too dissimilar to free association or automatic writing. Also, I think some of the lyrics were lifted straight from [Brian Eno’s] Oblique Strategies, which I guess thematically makes it pretty sound.
Pete (Sonic Boom) and I got super into downloading and manipulating YouTube clips. We would DL old Bell Labs vocoder demos or speech pathology-type sounds. The last song on this record is largely made from old vocoder YouTube clips. Oh and SB has a Synthi as well, so there’s that.
