Awaiting the arrival of an unprompted response from the subconscious might seem a rotten excuse for an almost two-decade impasse. But to left-field American outfit Tuxedomoon, it's nothing unusual.

"It's a case of having to immerse myself in the process of composition," muses founding member Blaine Reininger as he sits watching DVDs at home in Athens, Greece. "Things begin to appear with this sort of logic, and you feel obliged to follow the path you're taking. It's a sort of automatic process of creation. I don't know what I'm going to do before it starts happening."

This perhaps explains everything (or nothing at all) about what sparked Cabin in the Sky, Tuxedomoon's long-awaited follow-up to the 1987 album You — but it's a long story.

Emerging from the music lab of San Francisco City College in June 1977, multi-instrumentalists Reininger and Steven Brown, later to be joined by Peter Principle on bass, embraced a "no rules" policy from the start, one that inevitably cut against the grain of all acceptable norms. Perhaps it was bad timing, but America was by no means ready for them. So the early '80s saw them relocating to Europe.

With its burgeoning music, arts and theater scene, Brussels was a good place to be seen and heard. By absorbing the local culture with the likes of Can, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno as reference points, the trio soon achieved underground cult status.

"Our music has always been outside of time and to this day it still doesn't fit into any musical genre," declares Reininger. After releasing a handful of critically acclaimed albums — Half Mute, Holy Wars and Desire — the band dispersed. Reininger ended up in Greece, Brown in Mexico and Principle in New York.

"It's strange, but I don't think we ever actually split up as such," says Reininger. "We always tended to work on different projects with various lineups. I worked a lot during the '90s traveling around Europe doing classical shows. We were separated more by distance than anything else."

An exciting new chapter opened in 1997, however, when Cabin in the Sky began to materialize. But it took an incredible seven years to bring to fruition, during which the band got its groove back.

"When we got back together after seven years of not working as Tuxedomoon, we concentrated on touring and getting back in the groove of playing together in public again," says Brown from his home in Atzompa, Mexico. "In 2000, we toured Europe playing Half Mute in its entirety, something we had never done. When it became apparent that we could still work together and we had an enthusiastic audience, the next logical step seemed to be new compositions."

Brown came up with the Cabin in the Sky title, according to Reininger, who says, "I think it has more to do with airplanes than anything else — we spend a lot of time in airplanes. It also sounds like a distant ideal."

Asked about any narrative thread to the album, Reininger says, "The songs are pretty diverse, but the narrative thread that was consciously undertaken was to try and include elements of La Marche, the town in northern Italy where we recorded the album. That's why there's a certain number of field recordings of people singing in Italian, as well as recordings of a rain storm."

For their debut Prague performance, the three original members will be joined by Dutch trumpet player Luc van Lieshout, and George Kakanakis from Athens running on-screen projections. "I'm delighted to be playing Prague," says Brown, "It's been a dream for too many years. I was in Prague for New Year's Eve '92, when a country called Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. I even have the recordings I made that night — all the firecrackers and crazy partying in the streets. I look forward to being hypnotized again."