Seth Price is widely known as a contemporary artist who treats images, objects and texts as if they were files moving through a system: copied, compressed, circulated, altered along the way. Across video, sculpture, music and writing, his work probes how media infrastructures shape not only what we see, but how we think and feel about seeing. Questions of distribution and reproduction run through his installations and his essays alike, which have become key reference points in debates around art’s life beyond the gallery. Within that broader practice, sound has often appeared as a kind of phantom thread - present but rarely foregrounded, a current that powered the work from underneath.
Music entered Price’s practice in the mid‑1990s via a 4‑track recorder and a stubborn desire to see what could be done with almost nothing. Early pieces grew out of field recordings, found sounds, feedback, tape loops and whatever equipment was at hand. The studio was less a place of polished production than of experimental research, a lab for testing how far raw material could be bent before it broke. For more than a decade, these recordings functioned as both sketchbook and secret diary, feeding into film and video projects while also mapping out an emotional register that remained largely offstage. “It was really the emotional soundtrack to my life,” he has said - a telling phrase for an artist otherwise associated with cool conceptual manoeuvres and systems‑level thinking.
Inner Storm brings that submerged sensibility to the surface with a new clarity. Conceived at a moment of acute personal intensity, the album unfolds not as commentary or conceptual exercise, but as an immediate document of feeling under pressure. Rather than constructing the pieces through editing and layering, Price commits to four compositions built from single‑pass improvisations. Each track is performed live using a replica of an early synthesizer that offers no safety net: no presets, no automation, only manual control in real time. This choice forces a direct, embodied relationship to sound; there is no going back to fix a phrase or smooth a transition. What you hear is the trace of decisions made second by second, under the hand.
At the core of the album lies a constant LFO pulse, a low‑frequency oscillation that acts as an internal rhythm rather than a conventional beat. This pulse subtly modulates timbre and pitch, binding the four pieces together like a shared, restless heartbeat. Around it, Price navigates the synthesizer’s parameters by touch and intuition, allowing tones to thicken into drones, fracture into noise, or thin out into almost melodic lines. Effects pedals sit at his feet, adjusted on the fly: a twist of delay here, a push into overdrive there, a sudden bloom of reverb that pulls the sound into distant space. Because everything is done in the moment, each surge or collapse of texture is inseparable from the gesture that triggered it; form and performance are fused.
What emerges is a record that feels at once tightly constrained and emotionally volatile. The limited palette - one synth, a chain of pedals, a recurring LFO - becomes a pressure cooker, forcing nuance from small shifts rather than grand gestures. Within those constraints, the music moves from tense, needling insistence to wide, suspended fields where time seems to slow and attention narrows. You can hear pauses where the hand hesitates, swells where a parameter is pushed too far then reeled back, small accidents that become structural. The “storm” of the title is less a cinematic tempest than an inner weather system: pulses, tremors, sudden squalls of distortion, followed by long, uneasy calms.
More than a simple return to recording, Inner Storm reasserts music as a crucial site within Price’s work - a place where process, emotion and temporality align with a directness that other media sometimes obscure. Here, the questions that animate his installations and writings - about mediation, control, circulation, the life of information - are rerouted through the body and the ear. Sound is not a soundtrack to something else; it is the artwork, the process and the record of a specific slice of lived time, all at once. In fixing these four performances to disc, Price offers not a definitive statement, but a snapshot of an ongoing inquiry: how to make inner turbulence audible without taming it, and how to let a machine’s limited vocabulary speak in a human, faltering, unmistakably present voice.
