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“Being is a fracture. A note between thought and expression. When I wrote this record I was riding a wave of light and dark; I still am. It’s not a twisted path but one that aspires to harmony. In all the little bits that make up the bulk of the ‘songs’ of this album is a jump. Every step in the process of this record felt like, and continues to feel like a jump. From the bass line to the album ‘description.’ So here I am jumping into your mercy, a leap I will never forget. I feel the future can only bring better or worse and definitely not the same. So this record is a thing that will never happen again. I hope you enjoy it.” – Caila Thompson-Hannant

Canadian? Buy it from our friends at Paper Bag Records here.

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Making The Saint is my newest full-length record. I recorded it inside a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains of California. The owners told me to keep an eye out for ghosts. When I started driving up into the mountains, I didn’t have any new music prepared. I’d just finished an East Coast tour with my Psychic Temple band; six members strong on the road and twelve musicians back at home. A big band for sure. We’d already booked another tour with the guys, each of whom have their own bands. As I drove, I found myself yearning for an intimate, unpolished sound. Even though Psychic Temple is a big deal, I love small records. When I say “small record,” I think of Sandy Bull’s Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo, Bill Evans trio albums at the Village Vanguard, Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting, or Thelonius Monk’s sublime Solo Monk. Each of these albums is simple and direct. Making The Saint is a small record too. I didn’t belabor it. Everything came together quickly. I followed my instincts. Making The Saint is also a spiritual retreat; a healthy and necessary separation after so many strong collaborations. If you’re Sufist, you’d call this khalwa. In Japanese Zen Buddhism, it’s known as sesshin. The Santerian process of Asiento requires the initiate to dress in white garments and avoid physical contact for one year. Like so many have done before me, I forced myself into solitude and found something new. I recommend listening to this album on a Sunday morning before the day makes an imposition. I hope you enjoy it. – Chris Schlarb

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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.

In the summer of 2011, Ringhofer’s wife accepted a temporary post-doc at a Brussels, Belgium museum, and the couple relocated to Europe for six months.  Thanks to the intricacies of international bureaucracy, John was not permitted to seek formal employment in Belgium, so his days were filled with songwriting and making rough demos with the few instruments he’d been able to pack.  He improvised arrangements on what was available to him: rhythms on boxes, ziplock bags, the radiator.  He made field recordings of Belgian crosswalk tickers and pond ducks.  He tuned the dings of a microwave oven.  After the couple returned to California in early 2012, John began to re-record some of these demos into songs on a 16-track ½” reel-to-reel tape recorder, then mixed and embellished them in Brooklyn, NY with Sufjan Stevens in September 2013.  These tunes became Flying Scroll Flight Control.

This album presents Dada interior-architectural songs, in the mode of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, the sound of Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard combines, interrupted by Futurist noise intoner music of collision.  They’re integrated with the radiant flicker of Stan Brakhage’s domestic/personal 1960s art films, the mechanized music of Conlon Nancarrow, Mister Rogers’ avant-garde children’s operas, and the methods of grunge-era home-taping alchemists Eric’s Trip, with scriptures giving voice to the unknown.

Particularly encouraged by German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys’ desire to unite spirit and science, Ringhofer identifies Flying Scroll Flight Control’s arrangements with the most basic building blocks of life, the structures of atoms: mostly empty space and a dense core, around which thinner layers wind—tiny, slippery, whirring, fly-by electrons, perpetually in motion.  The lyrics are primarily based on the most ancient, foundational, and audacious of Christian texts (possibly early hymns), quoted in the letters of Paul of Tarsus.

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—not unlike Beuys’ use of honey, fat, or hare’s blood as painting mediums.

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.

Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms was created in the heart of hippy country, LA’s Topanga Canyon, by a dental hygienist who was inspired by nature and by the cultural revolution going on around her. When Parallelograms was finished, it sounded like a masterpiece, but the label had pressed it so poorly, sales were non-existent. Obscurity beckoned.

But in the internet age obscurity can be discreetly transformed into a kind of niche immortality. By 2003, Parallelograms had become a cult album.

Slowly, Perhacs began making music again. In 2010, she connected with a new generation of LA musicians attuned to her vision, including Fernando Perdomo and Chris Price, both accomplished musicians and producers in their own right. The trio began recording the eclipse song, “River Of God”, and what became a new album’s title track, The Soul Of All Natural Things.

The Soul Of All Natural Things, for all its apparent serenity, is also a subtly polemical album, full of exhortations to take a step out of our frantic everyday lives. “We get too far out of balance and we must find a way to get back to our polestar,” Perhacs says. “I have a deeper purpose. My soul is giving itself to the people; I want them to be helped, I want them to be lifted.”

The Soul Of All Natural Things is available through Asthmatic Kitty Records on March 4th, 2014.

CD and LP include immediate download of full album in 320kbps MP3.
LP also includes download coupon to MP3 and FLAC.

Dear Reggae,

I know it’s only been a couple days but I miss you already. There’s so much about you that I love – the way you approach situations in a relaxed and positive way, the way you absorb whatever strange element come at you and you just fold it into your nature. I admire you and your ease in the world, but it also stirs my anxieties about life – why can’t I be so cool, relaxed, so positive? I’m always wrapped up in my crazy modern brain and life. But then I wonder, are you too? Maybe you’re just as conflicted and human, but everyday you make the choice to express yourself in an uplifting and unselfconscious way. Can you show me how to do that? I love you, Reggae, and I want to learn.

love forever, Rafter

(for our 3rd anniversary Lizeth and I went to Maui. we drove around in our rental jeep listening to the FM radio and it reminded me of the awesome spirit of reggae… cause that’s ALL that’s on the air there… bad local reggae music… i remember a chorus that went “i appreciate my life… whoa”. the song was terrible but i was so happy for the lack of angst in it. so inspiring. i came back and started soaking in great reggae…The Congos, The Upsetters, Trojan and Studio One and Lee Scratch Perry compilations galore, so many amazing albums and such a good feeling world of music… i wanted to make a reggae record so much but it felt so very ill-advised, which of course made it that much more attractive… living in southern california there are so very many terrible white boy reggae bands! my drummer Nathan loves reggae as much as me, and one night the feeling was right and we started making this record… pounding our tracks into an ancient and huge 4 track machine from the 70s… i slowly kept working on it as the inspirations came… every step from then till now has been a total delight. i don’t think i’ve ever danced more in the studio while making a record. the music just feels so good to me. i hope it feels great to you too!)