Ultrasonic Grand Prix (Little Barrie & Shawn Lee)

The story of Ultrasonic Grand Prix is one of the two vintage 60s guitars and their owners. 

I love my 1967 Vox Grand Prix guitar,” declares multi-instrumentalist/producer Shawn Lee –  creator, among other feats, of the soundtrack for Rockstar video game classic Bully, and one half of Ultrasonic Grand Prix.“It is a serious beast and an important part of my arsenal. Every tone you need…’

For guitar maestro Barrie Cadogan – of Nottingham Freakbeaters Little Barrie, best known for the main title theme of ‘Better Call Saul’, The The, Liam Gallagher and playing on the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’ – it was the Vox Ultrasonic, also from the same period, that caught his eye. “I first became interested in Vox guitars because of people who used them like Spacemen 3 and the James Brown band of the late 60’s”, he explains, “but it was when I was part of a recording session at Anton Newcombe’s studio in Berlin that I had chance to get to know the Vox gear better. I was borrowing an Ultrasonic from a friend for a while and Shawn already had his Grand Prix. I thought it would be a good name for our project whenever we got it going.’

It was with this shared passion for these weapons of vintage, psychedelic gold that the suave, velvety, and off-kilter cool of INSTAFUZZ was born. While a project born of recent times,the flames of INSTAFUZZ were first ignited all the way in 2010, where the two met during mixing sessions for Little Barrie’s 2011 LP King of the Waves. 

Within this lysergic collage pulled from 60 years of counter-culture, memorably binding INSTAFUZZ together – its punctator and delineator –  comes the crazed, impassioned voice of midwestern Baptist preacher The Prophet Five.

A longtime fan of the prophet, who used quotes from his local Sunday morning radio show for personal in-jokes and catch phrases among his friends, Lee pulled the samples on INSTAFUZZ from a cassette tape owned since the early 80s that he’d recorded via Wichita college radio station KMUW – “I had his shows recorded on cassette and was always waiting for the right record to use them on. At last it is now!!!!!” proclaims Lee. 

A treasure trove of lyrical gold, each little snippet of the Prophet is a precious pearl in its own right: “Can I get a Witness? Or at least a glass of Water?”; “One day, there was a man who dreamed of a wah-wah pedal. I said, “don’t be such a cry baby!”. He is the avatar of INSTAFUZZ, the vocal embodiment of the record’s playful, yet deeply spirited sense of nostalgic wonder.

And the music that did emerge was weird, startling, and insatiably groovy. With one foot dipped in the organ-warbling garage of 60s psych, and the other vibrating in the mind-expanding fractals of the British Acid House boom, INSTAFUZZ plies the earthly quintessences of blues, rock, soul and jazz, against the preternatural discomforts of programmed drums and unhinged synthesisers to produce something distinctly and nostalgically futuristic.

https://youtu.be/MPueWPhYJL4?si=knNpYbZ5y9QIkaIU