Half-Handed Cloud

Performance artist and multi-instrumentalist John Ringhofer adopted a biblical name to lead Half-Handed Cloud, the vehicle through which he crafts economically complex pop. Once his stint in the eccentric outfit Wookieback concluded, Ringhofer forged a singular identity by committing to extremely abbreviated song forms.

He routinely appears wielding a 1960s Sears particle-board guitar, a trombone, and whichever additional instruments come to hand, often sharing the stage with ghoulish dolls and wearing pieces of homemade art, thereby commanding attention at open-minded venues. Ringhofer traces his condensed compositional approach to his military parent upbringing, yielding densely layered pop miniatures aimed at listeners with brief attention spans.

His first album, 2001’s Learning About Your Scale, dispatched twenty-five songs in roughly twenty-four minutes and thereby established new benchmarks for economical pop construction. The 2002 follow-up We Haven’t Just Been Told, We Have Been Loved came next, succeeded by Thy Is a Word & Feet Need Lamps in 2005 and the sprawling Halos + Lassos in 2006.

Cut Me Down & Count My Rings, comprising B-sides, Internet-only tracks, compilation appearances, and Christmas tunes, surfaced in 2010; later that year the project issued its fifth full-length, As Stowaways in Cabinets of Surf, We Live-out in Our Members a Kind of Rebirth. Flying Scroll Flight Control arrived in 2014, presenting eighteen characteristically brief pieces tracked over twelve months inside a Berkeley, California church.

Through his association with the Sounds Familyre label, Ringhofer maintains close ties to like-minded acts such as the Danielson Famile, locating Half-Handed Cloud within an expanding circle of uniquely avant-garde Christian artists.