Victor Rice

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Victor Rice is an influential musician, producer and mix engineer from New York City. Raised in Huntington, New York. He attended the Manhattan School of Music and began his professional career in the late 1980s during ska music’s so-called third wave as both a bassist and producer. In the late 1990s he became a composer and sound designer for television. In 2002, Rice moved to Brazil and although he continued working as a producer, performer and sound designer, he shifted his focus and became renowned as a mix engineer, working with a variety of local groups representing a number of different genres.

Ska & Reggae

Rice began playing ska music in 1988 as a bass player with The Scofflaws, one of the most important ska bands of the third wave era. In the early and mid-1990s, he emerged as a central figure in New York’s ska scene, both as a performer (Scofflaws, Stubborn All-Stars, New York Ska Jazz Ensemble) and a producer, (The Pietasters, The Slackers, The Adjusters, Skavoovie and the Epitones and others) and gained notoriety for having worked with many of the bands on the influential Moon Ska record label. In 1996, Rice began experimenting with dub music, largely at Version City, the recording studio Jeff "King Django" Baker founded on East Third Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side for his label, Stubborn Records. The approach to music at Version City was completely analog and novel, in that recordings were largely collaborative and community oriented. This allowed Rice to explore and develop his dub technique with the large “Version City Rockers” stable of musicians, alongside musician/producers like “Agent” Jay Nugent. Rice’s first solo record, At Version City, was recorded completely at the Version City studio and released in 1999.