Half-Handed Cloud Flutterama Brown Vinyl Edition

Flutterama, the seventh album from Half-handed Cloud is a record of 18 jubilant indie-pop songs by John Ringhofer, investigating spiritual incompetence with lively arrangements and radiant melodies that skillfully dissolve into deterioration using herky-jerky tape manipulation, analog wow-and-flutter, and an animated orchestra of home-recorded sound effects. Ringhofer's work on Flutterama was mainly inspired by late '50s/early '60s pre-synthesizer academic tape music (Henk Badings, Tod Dockstader, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Malcolm Pointon), along with Frances Mary Hunter Gordon's adolescent liturgies (recorded at Abbey Road during The Beatles era), turbid sights and sounds in Guy Maddin films, R. Stevie Moore's home-taped pop universe, Alberto Burri's stitched wound burlap assemblages, Lou Barlow/Dinosaur Jr's lo-fi "Poledo" sound collage (which name-checks Jesus), Julie Canlis book A Theology of the Ordinary, Wallace Berman's visual collage, and The Raincoats' magnificently shaky D.I.Y. aesthetic.The tape machine itself plays a vital role in the album's drive, interrupting moments of ecstasy and revelation with varispeed pitch shifts and grainy decay. These tape-fiddled tunes - recorded on a 16-track reel-to-reel recorder - employ surprisingly little synthesizer ("it felt like cheating," says Ringhofer). He preferred to craft most of the album's effects the long way, frequently going behind the back of rock instrumentation by hand-feeding 1/2" magnetic open reel recordings of deflating balloons, chord organs, tablecloth swipes, piano (occasionally tracked with a baby on his lap), brass, some guitars, and a quickly-cranked half-speed music box. Ringhofer was assisted by long-time Half-handed Cloud contributor Brandon Buckner on drums, and single-song backing vocals from Anacortes, WA songsmith John Van Deusen.