The intoxicating mix of music and technology that is Studio Voodoo is as much about the symbiotic partnership of founders Koz Mraz and Ted Price as it is about the myriad elements that make up Voodoo’s visionary sonic and sensory cocktail. The pair met in a Los Angeles recording studio where both were recording seperate projects.

They clicked right away, and their ongoing artistic duet has since generated 3 award-winning albums. The self titled DVD-Audio album Studio Voodoo, Club Voodoo and Fire & a Prayer. Club Voodoo is bold club remixes of their favorite tracks as well four new dance-flavored cuts featuring remixers Justin Lassen,Tommy Tallarico, Jon Holland and more. Plans are underway for an ongoing series of live “Club Voodoo” happenings, a full-scale theatrical production entitled Globalingua, The third surround DVD album features chantruse Larisa Stow. Both veteran travelers, the team’s extensive forays to Europe, China, India and Central America have also lent heavily to Studio Voodoo’s exotic world view. with the additional elements added by Stewart Copeland of the Police the sounds arising from Studio Voodoo’s convergence of man and state-of-the-art machine--as guided by Mraz’s and Price’s fruitful creative alchemy—is magic indeed.

While Koz often veers towards being the group’s uber-producer, and Ted its rhythm-master, “nothing happens that isn’t completely collaborative,” they insist, with each composing, conceptualizing and crafting in equal measure. The partners profess that artistically, they “finish each other’s sentences,” and their intuitive duet is vividly realized on Studio Voodoo, the self-titled debut album that came out in 2001 on DTS Entertainment, the label component of multi-channel audio pioneer DTS. The disc is historic in that it was DTS’s first-ever DVD-Audio release—and the first entire album conceived for and fully recorded in DTS’s cutting-edge 6.1 Extended Surround Sound. Studio Voodoo’s spatial and aural bravura lends itself perfectly to the multi-dimensional format, and also won the first DVD-Audio award when it was named “Best DVD Audio Disc” at the 4th Annual DVD Discus Awards and an Award of Excellence for “DVD Audio Music” . Club Voodoo won the Communicator Award and Fire & a Prayer winning the Platinum Aurora Award for Creative Excellence. Marrying primal beats and instincts with envelope-pushing technology, the album conjures up a universal and unifying vibe that Mraz calls music’s “ancient future.”

Throughout nine spine-tingling Studio Voodoo DVD-Audio, Mraz and Price bring to life global sound environments encompassing tribal bonfires, operatic reveries, flamenco passion plays and more, all connected by Studio Voodoo’s spiritual and ceremonial flourishes, and driving existential heartbeat. One cut, “Rain,” is the very first piece they composed jointly. Originally recorded in 1986 using analog 8-track, its mix of organic sounds, chanting (voices as instruments are a signature SV effect), and musical textures is a revelation in digital surround. The song’s dramatic evolution parallels the rich artistic journey that Studio Voodoo’s two principals—both lifelong musicians—have taken together.

Mraz came to California to study at Citrus College, where today he subsequently became a professor in the field of recording technology. Mraz also began DJ-ing at area radio stations and producing other artists as well as playing pop, jazz, rock and more. He and Ted met the now famous producers Mike Simpson and John King The Dust Brothers at KSPC. Never ceasing to hear the true music of his dreams via his innermost thoughts, already intact and just waiting to be realized. Mraz was programming and doing keyboards for ‘80s pop star Stacey Q at the time he collided with Ted Price. When they immediately bonded over shared sensibilities and a mutual love for synth bands, Gary says, “It freed me from boundaries. I could finally communicate what I had always been hearing inside my head.”

Another preternaturally precocious musician, Southern California native Ted Price became an instrumentalist when he was three, and studied classical piano from the ages of five through sixteen under the tutelage of Pomona College music professors. He joined his first rock band in high school, playing alongside two future members of the Grammy® winning act Asleep At The Wheel. Price reveled in the unscripted nature of popular music, in contrast to the classical protocol on which he was raised. He went on to study Economics at Claremont McKenna College, and became the music director and a DJ for KSPC-FM 88.7 at Pomona College. Over the years, Ted has been a part of a number of successful groups, including the pop-influenced Navigator and Roughneck Possie, who were named Best Reggae Band at the 1st annual San Diego Music Awards. He has explored spoken word poetry, worked at Radio Free Europe in Munich in the late ‘80s, and collaborated with The Dust Brothers—whom he introduced to one another—on some of their earliest rap/DJ-based projects.

So far, Mraz and Price have managed to perpetuate their dream for almost two decades. Studio Voodoo was born when they decided to “First and foremost, do something just for us,” remembers Mraz. They began with “Rain” in the late ‘80s, when they did pioneering work with sampling and the use of musical loops. A later version of the track won 6th place a 1995 Keyboard Magazine contest out of a field of more than 800 entries, inspiring Ted and Koz to forge ahead. Their next creation was “This Beat Is Voodoo,” followed by “Fire,” first recorded at Ted’s house in San Diego. Shortly after, Koz, who was doing some work at L.A.’s Westlake Audio, attended an early seminar on surround sound, which was an epiphany to him, as the technology offered the ideal format for Studio Voodoo’s environmental mixes.

Mraz and Price came up with a surround mix of “Fire”—at Glendale’s Front Page, the first studio in the L.A. area equipped to do so—and sent it to DTS’s highly regarded Technical Director and production supervisor, Jeff Levison. DTS loved it and invited Ted and Gary to make a full-length 6.1 surround sound disc—the company’s first ever--and the rest is Studio Voodoo history. And Studio Voodoo is history in the making… Today, in the Long Beach-based “Voodoo Mansion,” Koz Mraz and Ted Price have assembled two fully-loaded surround sound production studios in which they realize their audio visions, wielding magic with new technology and newer ideas while creating the ground-breaking musical and sensory experiences that are Studio Voodoo.

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