ibanezer83
GAWT DALM this album SLAAAPS! Where to start?
The arrangements are amazing and dense but never too dense, and you still hear every note. Which also speaks to the quality of the production. Very well tracked and mixed with a keen ear for modulation, depth, warmth.
It definitely gets cray cray but never goes full Zappa. I dont feel like there are redundant notes for how many there are.
It's all very beautifully strange.. Like an eerie , emotive dream that wakes you up feeling enlightened. 10
Favorite track: Bridge of Ignorance Returns.
Like visions from a 3D comic book, color fantasies explode in vivid new sound-tones on Cloud Becomes Your Hand's Rest in Fleas. The band's second album for Northern Spy establishes the Brooklyn sextet as purveyors of googley-eyed psych-pop of the highest order, delivered in a kinetically singular dialect of the musical language of fun. Over eight tracks, Cloud Becomes Your Hand affirm their position in the secret lineage that links the pingings of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop to the happy goofing of Syd-era Pink Floyd (like if the busted gearwork at the end of "Bike" started its own band?), a line that connects the energy dome power of Devo to the collage-happy Frosted Ambassador wing of the Elephant 6 Recording Company. Feed your head, right? But while the collective destination might be the sweet innocence of marmalade skies, the Cloud irregulars are hardly musical naifs, executing dazzling conceptual and compositional turns that puts them just as much in the family of New York's uncompromising experimental music scene.
Led by multi-instrumentalist and composer Stephe (the ph is hard) Cooper, Cloud Becomes Your Hand's complex art-pop bursts into being from fragments and scraps, collaboratively sewn together into benevolent smokespewing contraptions that spin around drumming drummer Booker Stardrum and Sam Sowyrda's MIDI-triggered malletKAT percussion. Along with Hunter Jack (violin) and Weston Minissali (synth/vocals) comes the addition of bassist Simon Hanes--formerly of comrade DIY brain-exploders Guerilla Toss--whereby the Cloud gang gains some new rhythmo-melodic heft on their journey to the centre of our mind. Lyrics come courtesy of ongoing collaborations between Cooper, his friends, and some anarcho muse guiding the whole cotton candy ship, and Rest in Fleas sets down on our planet with enough bouncing choruses and surprise left-turn hooks for the whole happy mutant family.
Much like Cooper's songs, Cloud Becomes Your Hand has multiple origins. One is a theatrical stage experiment produced by Cooper and Cloud malletKATer Sam Sowyrda called Living Things-currently neither active nor disbanded--which yielded the stage instruction from which the Cooper drew the Cloud Becomes name. Another origin are Cooper's subsequent home recording endeavors released on cassette under the Cloud Becomes moniker, including Cloud Becomes Your Hand (2010) and Doggy Paddle (2011) before drafting an ensemble into service for live work. "Like punk rock coming out of a music box," Stereogum described one such performance. "A joyful journey through a strange land," said the New Yorker. Rocks or Cakes, the band's 2014 Northern Spy debut "thrills, buzzes, dives, [and] surprises," wrote Relix.
Just at home at hanging out at Brooklyn avant-garde institutions like Roulette as on homemade stages in over-enthusiastic loft installations, Cloud Becomes Your Hand are ready to find the doorway to elsewhere in any environment. Rest in Fleas functions much the same, using sleight of hand and pure charm to lash open a portal to the giddy surreal by any means necessary, from learned technique to spontaneous creation. Along with fellow travelers on the kosmik-noisenik highway like aggro-eclectic Northern Spy labelmates Dva and Horse Lords, Cloud Becomes Your Hand continue to fight the good fight by not fighting at all, just emitting only the most colorful of vibrations and letting the air and all available ears do the rest.
credits
released May 27, 2016
personnel -
Stephe Cooper - guitar, voice
Hunter Jack - violin
Simon Hanes - bass
Weston Minissali - synth, voice
Booker Stardrum - drums
Sam Sowyrda - malletkat
additional participants -
Caroline Bennett - lyrics and voice on 8
Erin Birgy - voice and fx and plucking on 4
Marilu Donovan - harp on 2
Mike Fotis - lyric contribution on 1, 6
Peter Hanson - saxophone on 6, flute on 5, 8
Isabel Martin - lyrics on 2, 5, partial lyrics on 6
Mara Mayer - clarinet and bass clarinet on 2
Dexter Price - song title for 2
1, 2, 3, 5 initial tracking at Gravesend Recordings by Julian Fader and Carlos Hernandez . everything else recorded at various homes and practice spaces.
mixing and mastering: Jonathan Schenke
music written by Stephe Cooper in collaboration with the personnel. clarinet composition on 2 by Simon Hanes.
CBYH was a recording project started by Stephe Cooper in 2010, morphing into a live band that played until 2017. check out new band TURBO WORLD: turboworld.bandcamp.com/album/my-challenger
super nice surreal beachy tunes. pleasant beats by my favorite band! i got into them back in feb 2020 right before the onset of quarantine so there's a special vibe i associate with them that this album has always managed to preserve. Raine
Mazurek's latest outing is a chaotic, powerful and emotional tribute to his mother, who suddenly passed earlier this year. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 14, 2014
still my favorite album of the decade. the grooves are built on spiraling repetition, yet no two moments are exactly alike. utterly mind-bending, yet dictated by thematic purpose. and it's still kept as a trim, ever-cool package, though at times the journey is so immersive it feels everlasting. Dada in a suit; a contained bubble of aesthetic perfection that moves everywhere without stopping or faltering for a second. fucking rock on \m/ Spencer Vik