Sky Flying Bird is a post-rock project by David Palmer, who is based in Boston, US. He, as Sky Flying By, 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 anesthetic 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.
Miscellany was a long time in the making only no one, including Sky Flying By, knew it. Over the course of five years and four releases there tends to be a collection of songs that simply got discarded for no apparent reason. Not that they were bad, or somehow lacking, they just didn’t fit, so attention was drawn to other pieces that somehow made it onto one of those records.
Miscellany is taking stock, revisiting those old forgotten songs that never quite got that finishing treatment others did.
This is a collection of half finished songs, worked on over the years, some released in their incomplete state, others never seeing the light of day – a cross section of where Sky Flying By was at that time until now where each piece was re-mixed, many parts re-recorded, all in an effort to take half finished ideas and transform them into fully realized songs that can now stand on their own.