Interview: Tony Price
Tony Price is a producer, engineer, and DJ from Greektown, Toronto, known for his fearless exploration of house, funk, electro, and experimental electronic music. In 2017, he founded Maximum Exposure, a music production company serving clients across music, fashion, and media. We sat down with Tony to discuss the vision behind his creative process.
Hi Tony, Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into music? Hello, my name is Tony and I’m a record producer, recording artist, DJ and writer from Greektown, Toronto. Over the last 15+ I’ve produced a lot of music for both myself and others. As a recording artist, I’ve released music on various record labels including L.I.E.S. Records, Telephone Explosion and my own label, Maximum Exposure. I’ve been into music since the moment I entered this world. Though I am the only musician in my family, I have been raised by and surrounded by music lovers my entire life. My parents, aunts, uncles and neighbours were very into club music in the 1980’s and 1990’s, especially freestyle, electro-funk and 80s boogie/disco. They were always recording radio shows, exchanging cassettes and blasting music around me in the house and car. I taught myself how to play guitar in sixth grade and eventually became fascinated with record production and started recording my friends’ bands in high school. This fascination still persists and has become the central focus of my life. Your sound is something else from the most things we hear these days, blending elements of electro, new wave, and experimental music. How would you describe your identity? Half of what I do is very much music for the body and the other half is music for the mind and as you mentioned, sometimes I like to blend all of these things together. I don’t know if I could (or even should try to) describe my musical identity in one word. But three words that I think could appropriately describe my ethos and approach would be: RUDE, CRUDE and ATTITUDE. I’ve always been fascinated with recordings that represent the the early stages of a new movement in music - early punk rock records from the late sixties, electronic jazz and dub from the seventies and the raw drum machine experimentation of chicago house detroit techno records from the eighties being prime examples and personal favourites. Many of these records were made with limited means, very quickly and you can almost feel the immediate, electric shock of the ideas entering the artists head still retained in the recordings. With everything I do, I try to retain, capture and emulate the rude, crude energy that I find so invigorating, electrifying and inspiring in those favourite records of mine.
How did Toronto shape you till what you are today? Where did the influences come from? Toronto has greatly shaped who I am as a musician. As much as I respect and appreciate the city’s musical heritage, I have repeatedly found myself frustrated and uninspired living there. This discontent has led me to leave many times to live in other places in America and Europe. This nomadic lifestyle has in turn greatly influenced the way I think about myself both as artist and as a Canadian. Toronto has a very rich musical history reaching back to the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and this has always been very inspirational to me. Yonge Street and Yorkville were very musically fertile grounds, launching the careers of many famous artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Bob Dylan found the Band in Toronto in the 60’s, George Clinton moved Funkadelic up to Toronto in the 1970’s, where started dropping LSD for the first time. In the 1980s we had places like the Twilight Zone open, a nightclub that had a Richard Long sound system and was the first place to host Frankie Knuckles as a DJ outside of America. a young Derrick May also played his first international gig in Toronto. With regards to dance music specifically, due to its geographical location and close proximity to Montreal, Detroit, Chicago and New York, Toronto has always been a major hub for disco, house music techno and even hip hop. Growing up as a record collector in Toronto was an amazing experience, as you would and still are able to find incredible records from all of those cities in the bins. The second part of this answer is unfortunately much more negative, as the truth is that very few people, including many music fans, musicians and DJs from Toronto are even aware of what I just mentioned. Toronto is notoriously bad at respecting, archiving and protecting its own cultural heritage and it can often feel culturally antagonistic towards itself. Many people from other countries don’t quite “get” Canada and don’t recognize just how different of a country it is to America. Between our small population, massive landmass and strange insecurities regarding our cultural identity, Canada can be a very difficult place to be a musician. Besides Toronto, Montreal and maybe Vancouver, there are few places that you can travel to and play on a regular basis as a DJ or electronic musician, and these places are far apart and expensive to get to. To play in America, we need to obtain a visa, a process which costs many thousands of dollars and takes many months. To make up for these shortcomings, we have a large grant system that likes to pride itself on supporting Canadian music, but unfortunately tends to favour certain types of artists making certain types of music with certain types of careers - the kinds not often associated with the more unordinary and independent sides of electronic music. Outside of music, what inspires you? Are there films, art movements, or subcultures that feed into your creative process? I feel like I am lucky to live in a state of constant inspiration. I can barely walk down a city street without having to stop and take a photo of an old sign or write down an idea that has come to mind after seeing a certain type of car pass me by. I am currently living in Athens, Greece, a city that is very old and ancient looking in many ways. But as miraculous and crazy as it is to be in the midst of such history, I find myself more fascinated by the ruins of the twentieth century here - old signage, cafe and restaurant interiors that are largely untouched or updated since the 1970s or even earlier, bizarre underground parking garages. There is just something uncanny, otherworldly and even sad about being surrounded by dilapidated artefacts from the era just before your time that I’ve always found very inspiring. I’ve always also found inspiration in print advertisements, specifically those from the 1970’s-1990’s, which was a period in which I think the artform reached its peak. I love advertising and truly do consider it an artform. You can learn so much about a culture and time period from its advertisements and discarded media. I’ve also been very obsessed with perfumery over the last few years the way scents can trigger entire films in your mind has always fascinated me and I’ve been thinking alot lately about how this relates to music and sound. Can you walk us through your production process? Do you have a go-to setup, or does it change with each project? It is always changing. The only constant parts of any sort of setup would be Ableton Live and my Quincy Jones signature line AKG701 Headphones which I’ve been using for over a decade now. I make a lot of music in a lot of places. Sometimes I work at my studio desk with all of my gear, sometimes I sit on a couch with my sampler in front of me while watching an old movie in the background. I also have a bad habit of making things while lying down in bed. I tend to work very fast and have learned to trust my instincts while making music. If an idea doesn’t reel right or if it feels like a battle to bring something to life, I will often quickly discard it and move on. Most of my ideas start off as quick sketches that are started either inside of Ableton Live or with a drum machine, sampler or synthesizer which I record into Live and arrange from there. I will take an idea as far as it can go, mixing and tweaking sound along the way, and make a quick bounce of the song. After that I will add it to one of my various folders in the amazing [untitled] app and listen to it while I walk through the city streets, work out at the gym or drive around. Because ideas arrive and create themselves so quickly in front of me, this listening period is crucial. I often need a few months at least to get to know my songs. I feel like I need to let them tell me what needs to be done to finish them, where they belong, and whether or not they even want to be released.
How do you see the underground electronic scene evolving right now, and where do you think it’s headed? Every conversation I have with someone involved in music, be it an artist, label owner, publicist, journalist, manager, club owner or booking agent seems to involve more questions than answers. How can an independent artist make more money off of their recorded output? How do you effectively promote a record in 2024? Is it worth it to pay for press? What press is there to even get? Singles or albums? TikTok or Instagram? How do you increase your monthly listeners? What is a monthly listener? Should I make videos of myself talking about my studio gear on social media or just make music? Do I even need a record label? What should a record label provide in 2025? Is vinyl worth the cost of production? Do people buy vinyl? How much should a record cost? Should I make merchandise or just keep making music? These are all very intriguing and important questions. As frustrating as it may be to try and navigate the industry right now, It is also a very exciting time to be alive as I believe that artists have as much say in determining the future of the industry as the tech firms and major labels do. It’s up to all of us involved in this vast ecosystem to find a way forward. That’s our job. Unfortunately, many people in the underground electronic music scene prefer watch themselves posture online, taking a sanctimonious moral stance against companies like Spotify, recycling tired liberal fantasies and clichés about how technology has eviscerated the “good old days” of the music industry instead of experimenting with all of the new tools available to us as a means of finding a way forward. There is a way forward and it depends on us as artists to actually forge that path instead of just theorizing about the state of affairs in Instagram infographics. Unfortunately, entitlement and narcissism run rampant in our culture, and this is not actually a priority for most. I also find it disheartening to see so many brilliant people reducing the quality of their intellectual, artistic and creative output to quick blasts of video content or half-baked political hot takes so as to maintain a manicured set of metrics that supposedly reflects their worth in the marketplace. We are all guilty of this, some of us more than others. But It is uncouth and unbecoming. Can you imagine Miles Davis doing selfie reels to promote his new limited edition t-shirt line? The state of technology has created circumstances where you can teach yourself how to produce and mix records by yourself and then distribute and market it to the entire world from your own bedroom for next to no cost. This is actually a miraculous time to be alive as a musician. I am completely against the cynicism, irony and the defeatist position that many in our scene and culture take as a given. I have faith that the ingenuity and brilliance of artists will find a way forward that ultimately benefits those of us who do this for the right reason and eventually, those of us who don’t belong here will drop out. Goodbye. That’s just how the universe works. Can you introduce Maximum Exposure Inc. to our readers? Maximum Exposure is my record label and music-focused production company. It is the umbrella under which I do various forms of music-related work such as production, mixing, sound design, songwriting, branding, graphic design and various forms of marketing. You’ve worked with a wide range of artists and companies. How does collaboration influence your creative direction with the imprint? Working with creative directors, film directors and visual artists in the worlds of fashion and advertising has taught me so much about how the audio and visual aspects of contemporary media actually linked together. Creating music for advertisements is fascinating to me because although we live in a time and culture that seems to prioritize the visual, I’ve come to realize that music and sound have just as much (if not more) power over how we perceive the world around us, especially when it comes to how we interact with products through marketing. I’ve also taken many of these lessons as strategies on how to effectively take my own work and present music as products in the digital domain. Many people feel uncomfortable or grossed out by the idea of promoting their art online, but I actually cherish having control over how my music is presented to the world. I am always envisioning potential album artwork concepts, typography and other visuals while I make music. To me, this is all part of record production now - from conception to dissemination. You have your residency on NTS Radio, How important are community radio’s and what’s your take and vision on your radio show? It would not be an understatement to say that finding NTS Radio has been probably the most important music related discovery of the last decade for me. I’ve always been intrigued, addicted to and obsessed with radio since I was a child. The mass consolidation of radio ownership in America in the late 1990’s had a ripple effect that definitely destroyed the spirit and magic of what radio once was. I definitely think that the rise of music piracy in the wake of this shift was a reaction to the loss of variety and access that radio once provided. NTS has largely sustained and propagated the ethos of pirate radio for the modern era, and their success is a miracle. It speaks to the undying desire and thirst that people have for quality radio. I have learned so about much incredible music and so much history through NTS radio and I will be eternally grateful for the ways it continues to enrich my life. My show, The Maximum Exposure Power Hour, is a bi-monthly show in the spirit of classic American dance music and hip hop radio shows from Detroit, Chicago, New York and Toronto by the likes of the WBMX Hot Mix 5, The Electrifying Mojo, the Drill Squad, Afrika Islam, Kool DJ Red Alert, etc. The goal is to create an action-packed hour of dance music, mixed completely live that retains the energy and electricity of a DJ set.
How and where do you dig for records? I dig for records all over the place. In person I like to visit record stores and flea markets. I don’t really buy records online as shipping has become ridiculously expensive, especially in Canada. But truthfully, most of my digging these days takes place on YouTube, Discogs and Instagram. What excites you most about the future of electronic music? Any trends or movements you’re keeping an eye on? I am actually very excited about the near future of record production software. I think that the implementation of artificial intelligence into DAWs is going to provide us with access to unforeseen avenues for music creation and I find myself more excited every day about the possibilities. The wealth of compositional tools and mixing devices that have already surfaced is incredible. It has helped take my music around corners I didn’t even see, and allowed me to get to my destination at much quicker speeds. Of course, many people like to take a fatalist position on this topic as well, but many of those people are incapable of producing a compelling tune regardless as to whether or not they are using AI software or a “real” instrument. Bad attitudes for content. Are they against calculators, stud finders and lighters too? What’s next for you? Any upcoming releases, collaborations, or projects we should be watching out for? I have just released a new album called “Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre” which is out now on Maximum Exposure. I am planning on releasing a lot of music in 2025. I’m preparing for the release of lots of dance music, a few more jazz-oriented projects and an album of tape loops that accompany various perfumes. ________ Editor: Nicolas Kerstens
