Description
Flying Scroll Flight Control is an album by the American indie combo Half-Handed Cloud, independently released on Asthmatic Kitty Records in June 2014. The album was recorded June 2012 – August 2013 in Berkeley, California, at the custodial church by band member John Ringhofer on a Tascam MSR-16 ½” reel-to-reel 16-track tape recorder. Analog to digital transfers by New, Improved Recording in Oakland, California. Drum kit recorded by Brandon Buckner at Soft Hiss in Hixson, Tennessee. Additional overdubs engineered by Sufjan Stevens during mixing. Mixed September 2013 by Sufjan Stevens and John Ringhofer in Brooklyn, New York. All songs written and arranged by John Ringhofer.
Promo
Half-handed Cloud’s John Ringhofer began writing songs for what would become Flying Scroll Flight Control a few months after the release of 2010’s Stowaways album. He’d married, moved out of the Berkeley, CA church he’d lived in since 2003, and into an Oakland, CA co-housing community.
The album features a 5-person female choir, manipulated recording tape, fuzz bass, clarinet, some piano, a child’s Magnus air organ, rhythmic zipper, trombone, a cushioned stylophone stick, and intermittent backpacker guitar. As a holdover from the Belgian demos, Ringhofer and friends also frequently repurposed objects into instruments for homemade sound effects.
Flying Scroll Flight Control exhibits a restored perception of mystery, the magnetic draw of arcane and peculiar visions. It gathers sound and supplies it with structure, harmonizing the rift between the physical and the metaphysical. These are songs that sing in multiple spaces.
John Ringhofer’s been making music through the Half-Handed Cloud moniker for nearly a decade and a half now under the aegis of Sufjan Stevens‘s Asthmatic Kitty label. John’s songs are as quirky as Sufjan’s (at the very least) but also substantially more explicitly Christian; almost every word here’s taken verbatim from various translations of the New Testament. I wasn’t understating the quirkiness, by the way; this is an album that features ducks, microwaves, zippers, and radiators as instruments alongside clarinets, children’s organs, trombones, and tiny choirs, all because of Ringhofer’s firm belief that everything is art. The result is something joyously and explosively creative-the band overflows with so many ideas that they can barely stick to a song for much more than a minute before jumping to a new tack, altogether racing through 18 songs or song fragments in a mere 26 minutes. Nothing feels disjointed here, though; the album’s up there with the best of Guided By Voices or Olivia Tremor Control, everything flowing perfectly, one theme to another, as Ringhofer flits from early Christian hymn to early Christian hymn. It’s a ramshackle masterpiece and an easy contender for my favourite Christian album this year. [Oscar Hyde, Cross Rhythms, August 2014]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/flying-scroll-flight-control/879227460)
CD tracklist:
01. Pneumatic Mystery Envelopes
02. Sensei Says
03. What Spins, By Your Hand Was Spun
04. Debtors To Greeks & Barbarians
05. Titus Three
06. We Toil And Struggle
07. He’s Already On Everyone’s Side
08. Psychic Failure, Utmost Patience
09. Enlightenment In The Way
10. Even If Angels Arrive With Plausible News
11. Festus, I Am Not Out Of My Mind
12. He Can’t Deny Himself
13. We Speak Of What We Know
14. Live As The Children Of Light Inside Of You
15. Secret Wisdom Intervening
16. Tablets Breathing Their Last Breath
17. Now The Veiled Faces Can Breathe
18. Flying Scroll Flight Patrol
Note: Released on both CD and Limited Edition 12-inch vinyl LP by Asthmatic Kitty Records. Available at Bandcamp: https://half-handedcloud.bandcamp.com/album/flying-scroll-flight-control
Flying Scroll Flight Control preview #2
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.