VICTOR RICE

Victor Rice is a Latin Grammy award winning engineer, musician, producer, and long-time Easy Star Records collaborator. Even though Rice is a prolific artist with remixes, production work, and credits including The Slackers, Easy Star All-Stars, Bixiga 70, The Toasters and more, he has only put out two solo albums in the past twenty years; At Version City (1999) and In America (2003), which are both sited as influential releases in the reggae and world music scenes. The prior expressed the energy of NYC’s burgeoning Lower East Side reggae scene, while the latter reflected Rice’s move to Sáo Paulo Brazil in 2002. His third studio release, Smoke, went deeper into the influence of Brazilian music where the musical stylings of MPB, pagode, and samba rock start to intertwine with Rice’s deep reggae, ska, and dub sensibilities. He further explores the creation of what he calls “Samba-Rocksteady,” or SRS, on the recently released sequel to Smoke, called Drink, which was released May 15, 2020.