Who are the Prodigal Sounds?

Prodigal Sounds is a nebulous project which encompasses the musical activities of myself: Colin Nicholls, and my brother Walter. This includes conventional band-oriented projects, film music, and other solo, collaborative, and related musical ventures.

I like your music. Where can I buy your CDs?

For now, write to me at colin at spacefold.com, and we'll arrange something.  For later, stay tuned: I'm trying to work something out that doesn't cost me unreasonable amounts of money to set up, and allows me to actually get paid for this stuff. You can also freely enjoy the mp3s on this site.

What's your origin story?

Walter and I both attended Auckland University in New Zealand, and during our time there, we flatted together for several years. Instead of buying food we collected various musical instruments and built up a home studio. I christened it "Prodigal Sounds", because it was such a good play on words.

Over the years, instead of studying for our engineering degrees, we managed to write a large quantity of musical material. Most of this material stayed at the demo stage, archived on to music cassettes, but some of it coalesced into more conventional song form, worthy of additional polishing. It has been a long standing project of mine to finish recording these songs and release them on CD, or lately other forms of distribution come to mind.

Since I moved from Auckland, New Zealand to the USA, Prodigal Sounds had to bifurcate, although Walter and I still collaborate long-distance.

What are your musical influences?

I try not to be limited by any particular style, but there is no doubt that guitar-wise,  Steve Howe, Steve Rothery, and Allan Holdsworth have been my primary influences. Compositionally, Thomas Dolby, Mike Oldfield and other progressive rock icons from the 70's and 80's would have to be mentioned.

What do you think of MP3 trading?

I think it's great, providing the artist (or copyright holder) has given their permission to freely distribute their music without recompense. For example, the mp3's available on this web site are free for you to share. They are medium-fidelity for that reason.

However, if you bought a CD from me and then ripped the audio to hi-fi mp3/hard disk and made it freely available for the world to pick at, I'd be annoyed. This is not "fair use" I'm talking about - it's "fair payment". I don't have a record deal - and I'm not sure I want one. I'd like to be fairly recompensed for my effort. So it doesn't take a genius to figure out that people who make copyrighted material freely available are hurting independent artists like me directly.

Who is Terry?

Terry flies planes. While I knew him at Auckland University, he would occasionally offer to take me flying with him. A couple of times we went up in a glider, an experience I will never forget.

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