Lunar Drive

God bless the Internet. Without it, bands like Lunar Drive could never exist. Based in London, England, Flagstaff, AZ, and Standing Rock, SD, the members of the band almost never work in the same room, using the net and international mail to ship partially-completed songs back and forth. Their music, blending U.K.-style dance beats with various forms of traditional Native American music, is similarly forward looking. The idea for Lunar Drive first formed when Sandy Hoover, a singer/songwriter from a small town in Colorado, drove off for parts unknown after graduating from high school, finally settling in a small town on the southern Ute reservation in Arizona and discovering traditional Native American music. After returning to Colorado to attend university and graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, Hoover followed her muse to London, where she spent her nights honing the craft of DJing on the London club scene and learning how to create her own music. In 1994, she returned to Arizona to attend a Native American Unity Festival, where she met and recorded a local Ute musician. Back in London, she transformed a sample of a speech that musician Jon Benally had given, and turned it into the single "Here at Black Rock, Arizona." Impressed, Nick Page from Transglobal Underground offered to help Hoover co-produce an album, but before work could proceed, Hoover was injured in a car accident and went to her mother's home in Arizona to recuperate. There, Hoover hooked up again with Benally and two other local musicians, the mono-named Minkler and Kevin Locke, and completed the recording of the album Here at Black Rock Arizona, taking the name Lunar Drive after the street her mother lived on. Returning to London, Hoover and Page remixed the album and released it in 1996 on the influential U.K. dance label Nation, which licensed the disc to Beggars Banquet for U.S. release. Lunar Drive returned in 1999 with All Together Here, featuring Hoover working with several new partners, primarily Ed Walksnice, a Cheyenne singer and rapper from Montana; Rey Cantil, a Filipino Navajo singer from Arizona; and Rueben Fast Horse, a Lakota flutist and drummer from South Dakota, as well as new co-producer and engineer David White, from London.