Half-Handed Cloud

    Half-Handed Cloud

    Berkeley, California9 reviews across 4 releases

    art rockexperimentalfolkindie pop
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    Half-Handed Cloud is the one-man recording project of John Ringhofer, begun in 1999 after songs written for an earlier college group took a different shape. The name came from an Old Testament image of a hand measuring a distant cloud. Ringhofer recorded the early material largely himself, with Daniel Smith helping place it in the Sounds Familyre circle and Asthmatic Kitty issuing the 1999 debut. Learning About Your Scale used acoustic pop as a base for abrupt song fragments, toy instruments, field sounds, and dense wordplay; its 25 songs occupied about half an hour. We Haven't Just Been Told, We Have Been Loved kept the brevity while giving the songs a clearer melodic and theological shape. By Thy Is A Word And Feet Need Lamps, the music had expanded into layered harmonies, orchestration, church recording, and unsettling retellings of Biblical stories.

    In 2005, Ringhofer joined Sufjan Stevens's touring circle, while continuing to record as Half-Handed Cloud and to play with Danielson. He released Halos & Lassos in 2006, followed by further collections and albums during the next decade; Brandon Buckner, a member of Ringhofer's former band Wookieback, contributed drums to later recordings. Ringhofer moved from Berkeley to Helsinki in 2015, but continued the project across recordings made in several countries. Half-Handed Cloud's later releases included Flying Scroll Flight Control in 2014 and Flutterama in 2022.

    4 releases reviewed