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Producer Tony Price returns to Telephone Explosion Records with his new “MARK VI” LP, an eclectic set of songs with a distinctly late-night feel. The album features 16 tracks of oblique drum machine funk, sizzling electro dubs and freaky public access TV atmospheres that spill into the streets with the combustible energy of a late night radio dance party before dissolving into a melt of bizarro techno-surrealist jazz by album’s end.
“MARK VI” is sixth full length from Mr. Price. This stretch of albums - “I Prefer Coca Cola” (2079), “Celica Absolu” (2018), “86’d” (2019), “La Vie” (2019) and “Interview/ Discount” (2020) - is a masterclass in uncouth production techniques, genre-melding and sonic satire. His production expertise has played role in breakthrough records from the likes of U.S. Girls, Young Guv, Ice Cream, the Badge Epoque Ensemble, Miss World, and Michael Rault, on labels like 4AD, Capitol Records, Burger Records, DFA, Slumberland, Run For Cover and more. In 2017 he founded Maximum Exposure, a record label and creative services unit tasked with providing top notch knob twiddling to the musical underground of the 2020’s.
His new record is named after the 1981 Lincoln Continental Mark VI that Mr. Price purchased off of a former radio DJ and archivist towards the end of 2020. In the trunk of the car was a bag full of cassette tapes of homemade mixes and radio show recordings from the late 1980’s that featured the kinetic clank of Detroit Techno, bombastic Def Jam instrumentals, TR-808 freestyle workouts, jacked-up Chicago House and hundreds of advertisements for outmoded products and redundant services. Utilizing early samplers like the Ensoniq Mirage, various drum machines and synthesizers, Tony ventured to create an album that celebrated the unabashed eclecticism, futurism and explosive production techniques of the music and commercials he heard on those tapes.
The crude and unrefined sonic source material that “MARK VI” is built from comes embedded with sizzle, hiss and hum. The messy leakage of parallel channels, telecommunication lines and metropolitan sound matter bleeds through in the spaces between beat and bassline. Foregrounding the auditory characteristics of the machinic unconscious, “MARK VI” is a celebration of the ghostly sonic artifacts from a time just before the future ceased to feel as though it were still in front of us. |
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