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This site originated as a showpiece for "Wheel of Heaven," an album by Chris Floyd and Nick Kulukundis. (You can get it at iTunes and other fine emporia.) Chris wrote the songs; Nick was the musical mastermind, a multi-instrumentalist producer/arranger (and co-wrote two of the tunes). Floyd was born and raised in rural Tennessee, in countryside outside Nashville; Kulukundis is, in every sense, a citizen of the world. As it said in the album's liner notes (by Roal Deakins):
"Nick's a sonic sender, a visionary of sound, " says Floyd. "He's been making music for decades, every kind of music. He's been on the charts, off-the-wall, underground. He's the one who made this happen. I played him some of the songs I'd been writing for the desk drawer all through the years, and he saw something in them. He's got a roomful of studio gear in his farmhouse in the English countryside, so I went down there and we worked up these songs.
With his arrangements and multi-instrumental work, Kulukundis "took the dry bones and made them dance," Floyd says. "He comes at it from an absolutely unique persepctive. Everything I write comes ultimately out of American traditional music. I'm rooted in it, and that's good, but you can get locked into it too. Nick brings a whole other world -- many worlds-- into the mix, opens it up, keeps it alive."
"Wheel of Heaven" is the first fruit of this unique collaboration between the wide world and the deep country, a music shot through with humor, sorrow, joy and mortality. The songs here are rough but vigorous sketches, laying down markers for the future. It's fun; but like the old-time Baptists, they play for keeps."
Not long after the album was recorded, Nick moved to India, and so the collaboration has lasped for the moment -- except for brief, sporadic renewals that have produced some of the songs now featured on this site, such as "Bread is Life" and "Lynchburg." There is talk of Nick returning to this side of the world, so the sparks may fly yet again.
In the meantime, Floyd has been carrying on with the rough sketches -- with the possibility of getting into the studio later this year with some top players on the local scene -- and waiting for the bruited return of the Sonic Sender from the subcontinent.
For now, we hope you'll enjoy sampling the wares here, and keep checking back. The rotation changes regularly; you never know what might turn up.
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