David Palmer, as Sky Flying By, is a sensational post-rock artist hailing from Boston, MA USA. He builds worlds out of music. His music career began with a cardboard box drum set, and he hasn’t lost any of the creativity or imagination along the way. His musical worlds are deep and rich, full of graceful melody and arcs of delicate strings, where the notes fly and dip and soar and the drums build bridges that carry you safely across. Not just ordinary drums; he pulls in African, Asian, and Latin elements in addition to standard drum kits to give a variety of audio textures. He experiments until the alchemy is perfect, exploring different ways to use analog instrumentation in conjunction with synths, mixing live string sounds with digital to create new tones, or stretching a sound out digitally to give a familiar instrument an entirely new voice. He’ll use anything that works, from a bow on a guitar to yes, even a cardboard box.

It seems strange that a musical journey that through the hardcore and straightedge musical scenes has brought him to post-rock, but it makes sense. The search for truth through music is a powerful quest, and the refusal to seek or offer anaesthetic is a hallmark of his music. Not that you’ll be looking for it. His music is not about finding pain, but about reaching the magical places that make us better than we are, the beauty in the world that we forget to see. He uses birds on his album covers, and it’s fitting: in his music, he flies you a little above the world, and you come back a little bit better than when you left.