Empire Burlesque

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Wheel of Heaven is a collection of songs by Chris Floyd, performed by Floyd and producer/arranger/multi-instrumentalist Nick Kulukundis. Below are excerpts from the liner notes by journalist Roal Deakins: Floyd took a winding road to music; but it was with him every step of the way. His father was the songleader in a Southern Baptist church in Watertown, Tennesse, a small town in the next county over from Nashville. Floyd grew up steeped in the cadences and melodies of country gospel. "It wasn't a holy-roller type thing," Floyd says, "but it was by no means bland or passionless. My father went at it with an almost rock-and-roll sensibility -- driving the songs forward, his foot pounding time, his voice charged with feeling, making every word come alive. Music was joy, music was fun -- but it was also life-and-death: heaven and hell hung in the balance, eternity and fate were always looming. With that kind of music, you play for keeps".... .He drifted in and out of various jobs -- car-washing, carpet-laying, warehouse work -- while drifting in and out of the university in Knoxville, where he studied Russian, religion and journalism. "I ended up working for small newspapers in Tennessee and Mississippi, covering everything: murder trials, county fairs, shootings, house fires, car wrecks, politics and dirty pool, police raids. I went on what had to be one of the last moonshine raids in the Tennessee hills -- you could get liquor almost anywhere by then, but here was this guy still cooking mash in the backwoods. A real traditionalist." ..... Eventually he ended up up in Russia, working for an English-language paper there, The Moscow Times, during the raucous heyday of the Yeltsin years. This turned out to be, in a convoluted way, the turning point on his path back to music. "I met an English girl there. She went off to Paris, I went back to Tennessee. Eventually we got married and settled in England." ... It was there that Floyd met world traveller Nick Kulukundis. "Nick's a sonic sender, a visionary of sound. 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.