Tony Price knows his latest album is a hard sell. Atmospheric and moody, Requiem for the Ontario Science Centre is a transportive ode to a dearly departed cultural monument. But before we even dive into the music of it all, at the top of our chat, he says thank you.
“Besides the fact that there are increasingly fewer and fewer places that cover music, let alone more niche things—this is an avant garde electronic jazz album. It’s not Brat,” he jokes. In his promotion of his album, Price has referred to Requiem as “a sonic eulogy dedicated to my favourite work of art.” One of the tracks is named after famed Ontario Science Centre architect, the late Raymond Moriyama.
For Price, much has changed in the intervening months since we last sat down for a formal interview. Last year, the Toronto-born musician decamped to New York and Athens, and it’s the latter city where he’s Zooming in from now. Requiem is a departure from his more recent work which cemented him—before he left the city—as a well-known fixture in Toronto’s nightlife community, transitioning from Hit Piece’s crisp beats to something weirder, far more experimental, but at once deeply moving.
“You don’t really know how to start with this type of thing. It does take a lot of trust in yourself and in the process of music making,” he says. “In many ways, this was not something I sat down and intended to create. It really did build itself.”
Requiem stemmed from Price testing out a synthesizer, and naturally grew into the album we hear today. The voices we hear in the title track are pulled from strangers’ old home videos that Price found on YouTube, adding unmistakable texture to the specific era he conjures as he’s pulling straight from the source.
“There is also this nostalgic factor there because it seems like it hasn’t been updated in a long time. There is this kind of attraction to it because it’s almost like you’re stepping into the past. It was quite an amazing thing to walk through the ’70s.”
With his friend Colin Fisher rounding out the track with a haunting saxophone part, “Requiem,” much like the rest of the album, mourns not just the Science Centre but perhaps Toronto’s past too.
Price frequently visited the Ontario Science Centre as a child, and much of our conversation revolves around its closing.
“Part of the emotion that I attached to the closure of the Science Centre and even Ontario Place is related to the optimism of that era, or my recollection of what an era before this was like when I was younger,” he says. “An era where life was much more communal; there was more in-person activity where we would be bumping up against each other, meeting places, not knowing what’s going to happen, and going out to see what will happen.”
For Price, the closing of the Science Centre is emblematic of much of what’s made Toronto such a difficult place to be an artist—and it’s part of why he left.
“Toronto seems to be particularly hit hard by this type of, let’s call it, techno-gentrification. We just have a city that’s run in a way that makes it beholden to the interests of private capital and hyper development, and that’s not friendly to culture at all.”
The Science Centre and Ontario Place are only two of the many historic Toronto locations that have been seemingly discarded for the sake of building soulless high-rises or sordid business schemes like the Nordic spa set to take over Toronto’s waterfront in the near future. It isn’t that more housing or a spa is necessarily a bad thing, but it appears to be a political priority as opposed to preserving Toronto’s culture.
“I have recollections of Yonge Street and what it was like to walk up from Yonge and Queen to Yonge and Bloor. It was a very seedy, electrifying place that slowly turned into something more like, I don’t know…not like that at all. I noticed that small businesses that I grew up in were all closing down,” he says. “A lot of the Greek culture that saturated my neighbourhood was disappearing as people were moving in from other neighbourhoods and driving the price of property up.”
Price, who’s looking to move permanently to Athens at some point, notes that the streets of that ancient city are filled with independent businesses, reminiscent of the Toronto Price grew up in, rather than the one we live in today.
With so many jobs being remote and having access to nearly everything you could possibly need via the Internet, there is this looming sense that we are all being incentivized to stay home. In trying to optimize our lives, we’ve become sequestered from truly living life. Price notes that in turn, the proliferation of the gig economy across nearly every single industry has caused them all to suffer, drawing a line from people not going to the office to local businesses like restaurants and dry cleaners suffering in turn.
“It’s very important to me to be around aesthetically beautiful things and old things and to be around a city that’s actually conducive to a healthy social culture, and I just don’t find any of that stuff to be a thing in Toronto at this point,” Price says.
Making art necessitates taking risks, I note. “It’s too expensive to take risks. It’s almost too expensive to survive,” Price comments in return.
What kind of art can we make if we’re unable to commune with one another, as he says earlier in our conversation, in places like the Science Centre?
“It’s hard for me to make a living [in Toronto],” Price says. “It’s hard for me to see a future for myself in both the kind of field and career that I work in as a musician and a music producer, and just socially.”
Price clearly cares about Toronto—it’s apparent in his work, in his words. For all the criticism he levies against the city, it’s easy to see that it’s coming from a place of love, of wanting the best for the place that shaped you into who you are.
“It’s very popular to trash talk Toronto, but I got up and left, so I’m not there right now,” he says. “I do miss it.”
