Tony Price: “He could have been full of shit, but he did give me a bag of amazing tapes”
The electro don delivers yet another motorized dance album, owing to an obsession with cars and 80s music
Canadian cut-up mainstay and Maximum Exposure boss, Tony Price, has unveiled his latest project. Coming ton the Telephone Explosion label, the LP MARK VI is a bold, drop-topped acceleration through 80s funk, late night dirges, electro sampledelica, and acid freakoutery.
The album’s making came about in an odd way. After Price bought an old car while on a trip to LA, he discovered a treasure trove of old cassettes and CDs in the trunk, owing to the tastes of the former 80s radio DJ who owned the car beforehand. With its title coming from the car’s name, a 1981 Lincoln Continental Mark VI, we were bowled over to learn that many of the samples appearing on it originate straight from the mouth of these old tapes and discs, explaining its naturally hissy, flattened, yet pitch-perfect style.
In light of the album’s release, we tracked Price down, and sought his consent for a verbal brain scan. The result is a fascinating journey through retro synthery, mysterious radio personalities, and musical grease…
At least three of your earlier releases so far (including both of your EPs on Maximum Exposure) have had automobile-related themes. Have you always been a motorhead?
In a way, yes, though I would go as far as to consider myself a “car guy” by any means. When I was very young I was a car fanatic, I could name every car on the road. My interest in cars has less to do with the mechanics and technical aspects of automobiles and more so to do with design and aesthetics. If you were to ask me anything about how engines or transmissions work I would probably have no idea how to respond, but if you were to ask me what my favorite year was for the Cadillac Eldorado in terms of design I could definitely answer.
As far as many of my releases having car related themes, that was not something I set out to do, honestly. Besides having an affinity for car design I think this partially has something do with the fact that to me, driving and music have always been majorly entwined in my life. From my earliest musical memories in the back seat of a car with my parents or my aunt and uncle blasting Freestyle mixtapes all the way up to the recent road trip across the Southwest United States that inspired my new album, something about listening to music loudly in a moving car creates a powerful circumstance that almost causes time to stop.
What drew you to the car that inspired this project – a 1981 Lincoln Continental Mark VI – and how did you first come across it?
At the time, I was in Taos, New Mexico. I was on Tour with a band when the pandemic hit and everything first shut down. Having sublet all of our apartments out for the foreseeable future, we had nowhere to really go so we stayed put where we were for several months. After it became evident that things were not going to change for a while, I started to look for a cheap car that I could buy and drive around while I was staying down there. I found a Craigslist ad for this car about 2 hours away on the outskirts of Albuquerque. The car was listed at an insanely low price, was in immaculate condition and had extremely low mileage (60,000 Miles). It was also strikingly beautiful, painted a sparkling root beer brown with a very decadent, plush interior – the height of luxury at the time it was designed for sure. When the man selling the car found out that I was a musician, we hit it off and he gave me an even better deal than it was listed for.
Who was the radio DJ/archivist you bought it from?
His name was Robert and he went by the name “DJ Bobby Jam”, or so he said. From what I understand he had a late night show at a college radio station in the late 1980’s in Michigan. I’m inclined to say that it was Wayne State University, as one of the tapes said “WDET FM” on it, but I’m not sure. As to what his actual role was within this show, or at this station I am unsure. He was an interesting character for sure. He could have been full of shit about the whole thing, but he did give me a bag of amazing tapes. After reaching out about a month after buying the car to ask a question about something under the hood, he stopped answering my calls, so I haven’t been able to follow up on our only meeting and get the story straight.
Can you reel off some of the names of the cassettes and CDs you found in the trunk?
Almost all of the tapes were homemade, mostly either straight recordings of radio programs or mixtapes with little to no track listing/information attached other than maybe a date or a name he had made up for a mix. Some of the mixes were pure Detroit: you’d hear Depeche Mode and OMD brushing up against “Atomic Dog” and some insane laser-guided electro tracks. There was a lot of mid-eighties rap in that bag too, drum machine heavy stuff by the likes of Kool Moe Dee, Run DMC, Davy DMX, etc.
Which other artists and projects were you drawing influence from, and why?
Musically, this album is very much about 1980’s dance music – early hip hop, house, techno and that short period of time when disco and funk started mutating electronically into all of these things. Besides being raised on this music from a young age, and having an affinity for it as a result, I’ve always found this time to be the most fascinating period in the history of popular music. The infiltration of the art form by machines in a way not seen up to that point created worlds of sound so futuristic and otherworldly that we’ve seemingly lost our direction trying to catch up to them.
I was also really into looking at pictures of twentieth century architecture around the time that I made this album. Having spent chunks of the previous two years prior driving around the U.S.A. and Canada, I really started to take notice of the the amount of towering glass and mirrored architecture that populated many cities in the last fifty years, especially buildings designed by John Portman like the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. and the Renaissance Centre in Detroit, and various other towers in my hometown of Toronto. There is something about this type of architecture that strikes me in a way similar to how the music I just described does, human made work with an unabashed ultra-futurist quality that embraces the speed, dynamism and sheen of the computer age, wearing an infatuation with these things it on it’s sleeve. Both Cybotron’s music and the Renaissance Centre in Detroit for instance, feel like the work of robots and man working in concert with one another, whereas now, so much art and design feels like robots working alone, trying to convince us that they are actually human.
What is it about the influence of ‘80s radio chatter and the ‘machinic unconscious’ that inspires you in particular?
I would say that it has less to do with the content of any sort of chatter, and more to do with the actual sonic qualities of these recordings. I am very inspired by, maybe even obsessed with the artificiality of recorded sound. There is nothing “natural” about recorded sound or music. The amount of hiss, crackle and noise, enhanced by layers of compression that accompanies a recording of radio chatter or music from the 80’s or 90’s is aesthetically appealing because as all of these artifacts stack up, it’s as if they are inviting you through a portal into some alien past.
In the same way that distortion, hiss, crackle, and hum alerts us to a recording’s artificiality, we’ve hit a point where having a song or recording that sounds too “good” or too “clean” also signals a sense of unwanted artificiality. When it comes to music technology, so much energy and so many resources were spent for decades trying to find a way to “clean up” sound, eliminate hiss, hum, crackle. We went so far into this idea that we started to hate what we were hearing and we’re now at the stage where every other week there is a hot new plugin or piece of gear that purports to replicate old, noisy gear to a tee.
This is what I meant when by talking about some sort of ‘machinic unconscious’, the vast network of sonic artifacts that lie beneath, between, inside, and at the edges of all recorded sounds; the crackle in between sounds on a vinyl record, the clouds of hiss that float above sound recorded on to tape, the grimy, ringing degradation of a detuned 12-bit sample, the line hum of an old synthesizer with a bad output, the scorching digital distortion of a pinned USB audio interface etc. In my productions I try to enhance, exploit and exaggerate these qualities in recorded sound as a way of calling attention to to artificiality of recorded sound, not only because I like how old things sound, but also because I feel that by letting these machines speak, they might tell us something about ourselves that we might not be hearing.
Was vaporwave / future funk an important influence on the project, or do you consider it to be in a separate lane to those styles?
I would say that on a musical level, this album mostly exists in a separate lane to vaporwave but in terms of intention and ethos, it is very much either inspired by it, or belonging close to it.
I didn’t know the term Vaporwave and how it related to music until 2015 when a track that I wrote and produced for U.S. Girls called “Navy & Cream” was called vaporwave in a review. The song was a very hazy take on 80’s RnB production that I had pitched down on tape, so I guess that technically it was very much a vaporwave type of thing. Though I definitely recall seeing all of this stuff online as some sort of burgeoning aesthetic category in the early 2010s, I somehow completely avoided it for the first several years of it’s existence. I didn’t really pay much attention to the theoretical angle or politics of this stuff until I started reading up on the architecture of the 1980’s and watching videos of people exploring empty shopping malls, and then I became very fascinated with the whole idea. With the exception of the “classics”, stuff like Internet Club, that Macintosh Plus album or Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro (which is one of my favorite albums), I largely find the music to be unimaginatively produced and kinda boring to listen to.
More generally, what are your thoughts on 80s revivalism and its popularity today?
I once had two roommates in London who were active swing dancers in some sort of neo-prohibition cosplay scene. They dressed the part, did their hair up like it was the jazz age, practiced all the dance moves and spoke the lingo. While living in that house, I was working on producing a record for a 1960’s style psych-garage band composed of three brothers and one of their girlfriends who all lived together in a sort of psychedelic dungeon. They all had matching bowl cuts, beaded necklaces, wore winklepicker boots, drainpipes and turtlenecks, taking acid and drinking lucozade all night like they were cruising Sunset Strip in 1967. We would walk over to Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington after our sessions and the place would be filled with people wearing feather boas, pretending to be Marc Bolan or Candy Darling on the Bowery in 1975. It’s everywhere. Within a span of one evening you can encounter the influence of culture spanning an entire century. This is our culture now. Is it goofy? Has it always been?
Following writers and thinkers like Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds or Fredric Jameson, it’s become popular to take the stance that a culture engulfed by “retromania”, “hauntology” or “formalized nostalgia” is a regressive one plagued by some sort of artistic impotence that has ruined the world. This is definitely a point of view that I have at times shared but it’s just miserable to look at the world in this way, really. It’s no fun. In reality, if I hear a well-written song on the radio that is an overt pastiche of an 80’s production by Jam & Lewis or Trevor Horn, I’m going to turn it up. Some of the best pop music of the last decade was straight up 80’s aesthetic revivalism. I’d even argue that producers like Sophie, or Max Martin’s production on The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” used the sounds of 1980’s production as a launchpad into levels of sonic futurism that were never possible up until that point, in a way similar to how Prince or the Neptunes had done with 60’s and 70’s RnB and and the technology available to them in previous decades.
I was raised by Polynesian and Greek parents who were very active club-goers in those cultural circles in Toronto in the 1980s. I’m always going to have an inclination towards the sounds and grooves of freestyle, boogie and house music as that’s what I was raised on. Should I actively try to avoid making music that speaks to my soul because it’s philosophically “bad” to try and replicate the sounds of the past? We have access to so much music and so much software and cheap recording equipment that it is inevitable that we would end up emulating the past. I think we need to stop with the eggheaded negativity and just have a good time!
Many of the synths and samplers you used to make ‘MARK VI’ were genuine vintage originals, like the Ensoniq Mirage. How did you track them down, and what was it like to program / use them?
I found the Ensoniq Mirage shortly after buying the Mark VI actually, for a very good price. On one long stretch of my drive from New Mexico to Los Angeles, I was listening to the Questlove Supreme Podcast, a really long interview with my number one musical inspiration and hero, Jimmy Jam. He mentioned that the majority of the sounds heard on Janet Jackson’s Control album were made with an Ensoniq Mirage. I was feeling sort of stuck creatively, having been doing most of my work at that time within the confines of a laptop and midi controller. I knew that these archaic samplers were notoriously hard to program and learn, but I also figured that dedicating some time to figuring this thing out would knock some ideas loose within me, and it definitely did. Learning how to use the Mirage was almost like learning how to program a computer from 1984. Editing wave samples and organizing tracks using a hexadecimal system and binary code on a two digit display is not really my idea of fun, but at the other end of this challenge was an invigorating feeling, that once again, felt like stepping into alien territory. New sounds, new textures, new problems to solve, new ways of thinking.
All of the other gear used was stuff that I have labored to learn over the years and still own, or pieces I have borrowed from friends. I find a lot of inspiration in music gear and their presets, but once I find myself getting bored with a machine or unit, I get rid of it. I sold half of the equipment I used during the making of this album shortly after submitting the masters to the label and have moved on to new toys, including the mirage.
What can we expect from you next?
I have a lot of music coming out in the next year or so, including another full length album on Long Island Electrical Systems. I’m also focusing my energy on my label and production company, Maximum Exposure. I have a lot of music and concepts that I want to share, and I am trying to figure out what the most effective and interesting ways to release music might be at this point in time. I’m in the process of starting an online “magazine” where I will posting interviews that I am conducting with various people involved in music, trying to chart the state of affairs as they stand at this time. Otherwise, just continuing to listen and talk about what is going on out there in the world.