New album from Half-handed Cloud, Flutterama, available now
June 17th, 2022 , by John Beeler
Flutterama, the seventh album from Half-handed Cloud (John Ringhofer), is available for purchasing and listening now. Check your local record store for the Oxidized Tape Brown LP, or you can buy an LP bundle for $45 that includes the LP, a union-made sew-on patch, some Half-handed Cloud balloons, an 11×17 artwork poster, and a Half-handed Cloud made-in-USA tote bag here. The LP and CD and cassette (in Wild Bilberry Purple!) are also available.
Listen to the album here.
This release (and indeed every Half-handed Cloud record!) is a milestone for the label. Our second catalog release, AKR002, was the 2001 reissue of Half-handed Cloud’s 1999 self-released album, Learning About Your Scale. We’ve been putting out Half-handed Cloud music since then – for over twenty years now! At a time when so many things feel so very ephemeral, we feel deeply honored to have been the long-standing home for Half-handed Cloud. John’s music is sobering and honest, but it is at the same time exuberantly joyful, profound, and ultimately hopeful. Flutterama is no exception. It’s in this spirit of great joy that we hear throughout the record that we release Flutterama into the world today — with the hope you receive it in the same way.
Half-handed Cloud is also touring in the US. Since John and his family live in Finland, this is a very rare event! Be sure to check the tour dates below. (Note: some tour dates are still in progress, so stay tuned to Half-handed Cloud’s Instagram account.)
Half-handed Cloud Tour:
Tue June 21st – TBD (western Virginia?)
Wed June 22nd – TBD (Asheville, NC?)
Thu June 23rd – NASHVILLE, TN
The Well – Green Hills – 7pm / 7:30pm
4002 Granny White Pike – $10
@music_at_the_well
w/ Eve’s Curse
@evescurse
FRI JUNE 24TH – ATLANTA, GA
Bell Street Burritos – 9pm
Krog Street (facing the Beltline)
112 Krog Street #1A – $10
@bellstreetburritos
SAT JUNE 25TH – CHATTANOOGA, TN
Cherry Street Tavern – 10pm
@cherrystreettavern
719 Cherry St – $10 Cover
Opening for Taylor Hollingsworth
@shataytaytottingsturf
SUN JUNE 26TH – KNOXVILLE, TN
The Pilot Light
106 E Jackson Ave
(in Knoxville’s Old City)
8pm, w/ Maspeth
TUE JUNE 28TH – PHILADELPHIA, PA
Evangelical Church Of The Atonement
1542 E Montgomery Ave (Fishtown)
@atonementfishtown – $10
Doors 7:15 / Start: 7:30
Opening for The Chairman Dances
@thechairmandances
“Swallowing The Water You Walk On:” New Half-handed Cloud Single available now
June 1st, 2022 , by John Beeler
“Swallowing The Water You Walk On,” the second single from Half-handed Cloud’s forthcoming album Flutterama, is available for listening now. You can hear it on your preferred platform here.
This song, a fuzzy and organically meandering tape machine bricolage, comprised primarily of vari-speed pianos, handclaps, and deflating latex balloons, peeks out from under the covers for a way through failure and ruin, by embracing transformational weakness and surrender. “Swallowing The Water You Walk On” is very possibly the heart of Half-handed Cloud’s new Flutterama album.
Flutterama is scheduled for release in just a couple of weeks on June 17, 2022. It’s available for pre-order here (or check with your local or online record store) on LP in Oxidized Tape Brown vinyl, CD, or Wild Bilberry Purple cassette, alongside a limited-edition patch and a biodegradable balloon.
A handcrafted artist’s book by John Ringhofer, limited to only 15 copies, is also available for purchase in a special LP bundle. (Note: we are currently sold out of these! But they’re still neat to look at – see below for video – and we have an almost-as-good bundle that includes balloons, a patch, and a poster here). These individually-numbered artist’s books, made with the 180-year-old cyanotype (architectural blueprint) process, utilize “genuine Finnish sunlight,” and incorporate moving parts and hand-painted sections.
Half-handed Cloud (aka John Ringhofer) and AKR and our artists have been collaborating together for a long time (HHC’s first album is AKR002, our second release!). HHC posted a series of posts on HHC’s Instagram account a number of weeks ago that provide a lot of fun details, including a rare interview with John Ringhofer and Sufjan from 2002 at WBAR. Listen to that here, and be sure to follow HHC on Instagram here.If you missed it, you can watch and listen to the first single, “Handles,”alongside a video shot in John’s adopted home of Helsinki, Finland with Super-8 movie film here.
Finally, be sure to check out HHC on Markly Morrison’s Low Profile podcast, which includes an interview and a terrific cable access performance by John Ringhofer of several HHC songs both classic and new. You can listen and watch here.
Half-handed Cloud Countdown to New Album Happening Now, Includes Photos of Sufjan and Other AKR Artists
April 19th, 2022 , by John Beeler
Last week, Half-handed Cloud (aka John Ringhofer) posted some big news: a new Half-handed Cloud is on its way!
Half-handed Cloud (HHC) has also started posting a countdown on his Instagram with posts documenting the story of Half-handed Cloud from then until now. Every few days he’s posting photos or material from his archive. Today he posted about meeting with Sufjan in 2001.
HHC has been a big part of AKR from the start. In our catalog numbering system, Half-handed Cloud’s debut release, Learning About Your Scale, is AKR002, our second release ever (Sufjan’s A Sun Came is AKR001). As John describes in today’s post, HHC and Sufjan met when Sufjan was touring with Danielson. From then on, HHC and Sufjan toured together early and often, playing together at shows as far back as Cornerstone in 2001 (Stryper! Larry Norman! MC Hammer!), or an Asthmatic Kitty 9/11 benefit show in NYC in December 2001.
HHC is promising all sorts of documentation in the next couple of weeks, including plenty of 35mm photo scans, possible sound clips & video, and stage history. Who knows what surprises are in that HHC archive! To stay tuned, click here.
It Can Be Simple
December 13th, 2014 , by John Beeler
Half-Handed Cloud’s Learning About Your Scale Turns 15!
Read the Rest...New Half-handed Cloud LP Lands Today
June 10th, 2014 , by John Beeler
It’s time to celebrate—with singing choirs, rattling tambourines, fuzz bass, wrong-speed magnetic tape playback, and other joyful noises—because the new Half-handed Cloud album is here, and you’ll want to sing along.
Half-handed Cloud is the solo project of John Ringhofer, who began working on Flying Scroll Flight Control in Belgium, while his wife was doing research at a Brussels museum. The album began as a series of totally DIY, one-man recordings put together with anything Ringhofer had to hand, setting ancient, sacred texts to upbeat pop melodies. Back in the States, Ringhofer then re-recorded the whole thing on old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape as layers upon layers of homespun goodness. The result: music of labyrinthine mysticism and complexity, but made out of raw, humble, unpretentious stuff and offered in full earnest.
Flying Scroll Flight Control is available on MP3, CD or LP. The LP comes on totally transparent vinyl with a card for a free digital download, and a deluxe edition of the vinyl release comes with a beautiful slipmat at which to gaze through the “pop-bottle-clear” record.
Half-Handed Cloud Album Release Show; New Single and Video
May 23rd, 2014 , by John Beeler
The new Half-Handed Cloud full-length, Flying Scroll Flight Control, is dropping next month, and the fanfare heralding its arrival is already underway.
In especially good news for fans of cryptic symbolism as well as complex, outsider-esque sacred pop, the official celebration begins on June 1 at 1, when Half-Handed Cloud’s afternoon release show begins at Ohmega Salvage. Not just a venue, Ohmega is also a working antique salvage yard in Berkeley, CA where beautiful old things that have been rediscovered amongst the detritus of the modern world can reclaimed and restored. Those Lavender Whales of Columbia, SC will be opening for a three-person Half-Handed Cloud lineup on the Ohmega stage.
But first, PopMatters is offering a quick preview of the album this week, praising the “sun-kissed melodies” and “quirky instrumentation” of the new track “Festus, I Am Not Out of My Mind” and making it available to stream in full at PopMatters.com.
And Half-Handed Cloud mastermind John Ringhofer has posted his own, high-concept teaser for Flying Scroll Flight Control. A short video conceived and sound-designed by Ringhofer himself, and relying heavily on an important contribution from one Dr. Ralph Kuri, this preview, like the album, is made up of equal parts ingenuity, metaphysics, magic, absurdity, and wit, and features just a few seconds of music from the new album’s “Titus Three.”
Out June 10 on Asthmatic Kitty Records, Flying Scroll Flight Control is already available for preorder on CD, mp3, clear vinyl, and a special LP release with custom slipmat.
Announcing Flying Scroll Flight Control from Half-handed Cloud
April 1st, 2014 , by John Beeler
Photo by Carolyn Pickell
Lately, Half-handed Cloud’s John Ringhofer has been paying close attention to Robert Rauschenberg, to Joseph Beuys, to artists and filmmakers and musicians who turn the stuff and debris of everyday life into high art–and it shows. Ringhofer is set to release Flying Scroll Flight Control, his sixth LP as Half-handed Cloud, on Asthmatic Kitty Records in June of this year, and it positively bristles with contradictions like these, of discerning the absolute truths concealed within chaos and ephemera.
The tunes on Flying Scroll Flight Control are pure pop–they were mixed and polished to a shine with Sufjan Stevens in his Brooklyn studio during the first week of September last year. At times the album’s buzzing trunkful of unlikely instruments suggest a rough-hewn, ramshackle aesthetic, recalling Flight Control‘s roots in the bedroom demos that Oakland-based Ringhofer made during a few months abroad, recording with whatever was at hand.
But nothing is disposable in the musical world of Half-handed Cloud: the dizzy arrangements envince the sophistication of Ringhofer’s musical thinking, while the lyrics dig deep into theological mysteries by way of Paul the Apostle.
With Flying Scroll Flight Control, Half-handed Cloud aims to marry the humblest sound-sources and the highest artistic aspirations, the giddiest aural pleasures and the most reverential jubilation, to be at once a confection for the ears and nourishment for the soul.
See the trailer below. You can pre-orders for the pop-bottle-clear vinyl, and CD, here.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!
December 23rd, 2013 , by John Beeler
Merry Christmas and happy holidays, from our family to you and yours! Whatever you might celebrating this season, and however you might be celebrating it, we hope you’ll enjoy some seasonal tunes our friends have put together for you.
Half-handed Cloud, Liz Janes, Danielson, and a heavenly host of other terrific artists have covered movements from the first part of Handel’s Messiah—that’s the Christmas part—to Familyre’s Messiah – Part 1, a charity compilation on Sounds Familyre Records. It only costs $4 to download the whole album here or send it as an instant gift, and all proceeds go to the Red Cross to benefit victims of Typhoon Haiyan.
Another project featuring Half-handed Cloud’s John Ringhofer, The Season’s Glreekins, is also offering their very rare, self-titled 1998 tape as a present to you. Only 150 copies of the original issue were ever dubbed by the Glreekins, a seasonal band from Cattanooga, but the Glreekins are giving it away again here on bandcamp to celebrate its 15th anniversary.
My Brightest Diamond just released a cover of Bob Dylan and Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love,” which you can hear here.
And finally, as a way to say thanks to you for a great year, we’ve put together a free sampler compilation, with some great cover art by animator Tom DesLongchamp. Download it on Noisetrade here.
So get someplace warm, and treat your ears to a little Christmas cheer. Here’s wishing you peace, joy and beautiful music this holiday season.
HALF-HANDED CLOUD RELEASE DOVE EP ON BURNT VINYL
September 16th, 2011 , by John Beeler
Record label Burnt Toast Vinyl has just released DOVE, a brand new EP from Half-handed Cloud. John Ringhofer of HHC has been working on the EP for several years now, and it’s as much a story as it is a record. He recorded the demos for DOVE in early 2008 and then played six of the songs during a live vinyl pressing with the Henningham Family Press in London (see video above). In between recording for Stowaways, John finally finished the record in the church where he used to live.
Songs are on one side of the limited edition EP, and op-art is etched on the other side. You can buy it from Burnt Toast Vinyl here, and we are carrying the commemorative poster of the event right here on AK.
