After working with Sufjan Stevens and Rafter Roberts on her first two full-length albums, Virginia native Liz Janes takes on a collection of dramatically re-arranged public domain songs with Los Angeles based free jazz collective, Create(!).

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A lo-fi lullaby of century old blues, folk songs and prayer music Liz Janes & Create(!) adds new wrinkles to well ironed standards. Jump-up jigs have been repurposed as plaintive banjo-led ballads while Biblical slave songs are smashed and stretched into full shack stomp and boogie. Here the work of Charlie Patton, Pete Seeger and the Carter Family are imbued with the spirits of John Coltrane, John Fahey and Nina Simone.

Recorded and produced by Create(!)’s Chris Schlarb in a one room shack without the use of any electric instruments, Liz Janes & Create(!) features some of Janes’ most inspired singing. Her voice slithers out from acoustic guitar drones of “All The Pretty Horses” and scrapes its rocky bottom on “Be My Husband.”

With nary a trace of irony, Liz Janes & Create (!) open the American songbook and write up their own chapter.

1. Lonesome Valley
2. Be My Husband
3. All the Pretty Horses
4. Jesus is a Dying Bed-maker
5. Run Ol’ Jeremiah/Keep Your Hands on the Plow
6. Careless Love

Sufjan Stevens’ 2005 Illinois takes the listener through ghost towns, grain mills, hospital rooms, and the City of Broad Shoulders, with guest appearances by a poet, a president, a serial murderer, UFOs, Superman, the goat that cursed the Cubs, and Decatur’s famous Chickenmobile. Stevens weaves variegated musical styles (jazz, funk, pop, folk, and Rodgers and Hammerstein-like flourishes) and the textures of 25 instruments into a tapestry of persons and places famous, infamous, iconic and anonymous.

Finally, after three years of legendary performances in their home town of San Diego, the amazing Bunky- Emily Joyce, Rafter Roberts, and friends- unleash their debut album, Born to be a Motorcycle.  Motorcycle will surprise even those who think they’ve heard it all; this eclectic collection of weird pop bliss blends punk, art-pop, and ballads with chugging horns, absurdist humor and bulls-eye production by veteran engineers Roberts and Joyce. The result is an album as lively as an armful of eels; Bunky rocks and croons with equal skill, sometimes in the same song. Joined by a cast of San Diego all-stars (members of Rocket from the Crypt, Castanets, Pinback, and others), Bunky blazes from the underground full-grown and ready to burn up the road.

The mostly narrative songs of Half-handed Cloud’s Thy is a Word and Feet Need Lamps revisit Bible verses and stories- predominantly Old Testament- that you may not have heard in Sunday school. Why recount the murder, mayhem, and sordid situations in The Good Book (a.k.a. The Bible)? Because as a whole it covers the entire spectrum of life, both the good and bad. Half-handed Cloud, never didactic in their work, refrain from drawing conclusions, but subtly and cinematically directs listener’s eyes and ears to the space between the words, leaving interpretation up to them. Be it tent pegs to the head, or cooking bread over human manure, you will be wooed by Half-handed Cloud’s ability to make these stories the most bittersweet of pop ditties.

Half-handed Cloud’s third album for Asthmatic Kitty, “Thy is a Word and Feet Need Lamps” delivers an enlightening new collection of signature songs by singer/songwriter/ multi-instrumentalist John Ringhofer. Half-handed Cloud’s first two full-length albums, “Learning About Your Scale (2001)” and “We Haven’t Just Been Told, We Have Been Loved (2002)” left critics struggling to draw comparisons with other artists, but Ringhofer acknowledges the influence of Brian Wilson, the Beatles, and some impossibly obscure musicians whose experimental music came of age in the 1960s.

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Influences aside, there is really no one quite like Half-handed Cloud. The album features guitars, cellos, pianos, bassy/breathy church organs, woodwinds, brass, non-instrument sounds, an eight-person choir, and various percussion, recorded almost entirely in the roomy space of a church sanctuary.

An accomplished painter and former teacher in the South Pacific, Ringhofer is known to search all quarters for sound-making devices to augment his multi-instrumental abilities. Combining this proclivity with his seemingly unlimited imagination and melodic gifts, he has staked out previously uninhabited musical territory, visitors always welcome.

A frequent member of Sufjan Steven’s touring band, Ringhofer is joined here by Stevens on drums; “Thy” was mixed by Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile, and mastered by Rafter Roberts, of label-mates Bunky.

Liz’ second album Poison & Snakes documents her growth as a seasoned singer, songwriter and performer; her addictive chameleon voice and unexpected phrasing are set against eclectic and unpredictable arrangements by herself and producer Rafter Roberts, who has also worked with such notables as The Rapture, Maquiladora, and Tristeza.

While Done Gone Fire dealt with her jazz, blues, and gospel influences both thematically and stylistically, Poison & Snakes follows up as a reflection on the American West, from its desert and mountains to the sea, while expanding on the themes of innocence lost in a broken world, and freedom amidst earthly limitation. Liz Janes creates a masterful tension between avant and pop sensibilities, wedding in joyous union elements of punk, gospel and country music.

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Poison & Snakes features accompaniment by producer Roberts, Bridgit DeCook, Emily Joyce, Raymond Raposa (Castanets), and Michael Kaufmann (Soul-junk). Also featured are members of some of San Diego’s most renowned bands; Poison & Snakes features contributions by drummer Tom Zinser (Pinback, Three Mile Pilot), trumpeter Jason Crane (Rocket from the Crypt) and backup vocals and saw by Pall Jenkins of Black Heart Procession, whom Liz worked with on their latest album, Amore del Tropico.

Cathedral is the debut release by a unique new voice of avant-country, San Diego’s Castanets. Backed by the haunting, angelic voice of newcomer Bridgit DeCook, and recorded mostly in a secluded cabin in the northern California woodlands, Cathedral illuminates the dark architecture where faith and doubt clash in an often-ambiguous search for the divine.

Sufjan Stevens, Asthmatic Kitty, and Soundsfamilyre announce Sufjan’s third full-length album, a collection of songs for his birth-state, Michigan, “The Great Lake State.”

Composed as a geographical tone poem, Michigan follows a metaphysical expedition through the idiosyncrasies of middle America. Drawing from personal anecdote, regional history, and state heritage, Stevens mixes social and political grievances with songs about snowmobiles, Henry Ford, the Detroit race riots, and love.

The songs on Michigan resonate with a range of sources-Vince Guaraldi, Terry Riley, and Nick Drake as accompanied by Stereolab and The Sea & Cake-in executing Stevens’ peculiar palette that is simultaneously rock and blue-grass, jazz and pop, a style The Village Voice appraises as “Arthur Lee meets the Book of Psalms.”

In Michigan, Stevens combines intimate, soft-spoken songwriting with the dense compositional complexity displayed on his previous release Enjoy Your Rabbit, which XLR8R called “…a transgressive, majestic album conjuring an academic jam session of Stereolab and Luke Vibert conducted by Steve Reich.”

Guest artists include Elin, Megan, and Daniel Smith (of The Danielson Famile), and John Ringhofer (Half-handed Cloud). Album art features original hand-paintings by Martha Stewart crafts editor Laura Normandin.

Michigan is the inaugural entry of THE 50 STATES, a cumulative recording project by Sufjan Stevens unparalleled in its panoramic enterprise: a record for each state! You think he’s kidding, don’t you?

“A Sun Came,” Sufjan Steven’s debut album for Asthmatic Kitty Records, incorporates, in his words, “traditional pop music, medieval instrumentation with Middle Eastern inflections, tape loops, digital samples, literary vocals, manic percussion, woodwinds, sitar, amp distortion and Arabic chants.” According to Toronto’s Now weekly, he “weaves together literary references, from Greek mythology to American Transcendentalism, then combines his tales with his Captain Beefheart and Sonic Youth influenced compositions.”

In 2001, Half-handed Cloud’s Learning About Your Scale careened across the landscape of independent music, establishing singer and multi-instrumentalist John Ringhofer as a refreshing, original new artist.

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With twenty-five tracks crammed into twenty-four minutes, Scale charmed and amazed reviewers and unaffiliated listeners alike with unexpected instrumentation (trombones, talking books, and an air conditioner) memorable melodies, and a dizzying funhouse vision of The Meaning of Life. With haiku-like clarity and substance, Ringhofer’s concise songs reflect a playful spirit unafraid of following the muse wherever it may lead. Committed but never pedantic, his unique fusion of the silly and serious simultaneously stimulates both reflection and giggles. Once again, Asthmatic Kitty and Soundsfamilyre join together to present a new collection of sonic diamonds by John Ringhofer and friends. We Haven’t Just been Told, We Have Been Loved, produced by John Ringhofer and Daniel Smith (The Danielson Famile), offers a new satchel of visionary vignettes, placing a delightful oddball narrative over a fractured soundscape.

Listeners are guaranteed a great time, but behind the fast acceleration and sudden stops, and the beeps, honks and whirs, HHC’s John Ringhofer casts a gentle glowing light on What Really Matters.