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| DMA Label Profile |
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"...YOU WANT THAT FARMER IN ARKANSAS WHO'S SUCKING ON A PIECE OF STRAW TO SING YOUR MUSIC." MRK Records is the latest entertainment business venture by the talented and highly successful husband-wife team of Roy and Marina Kamen. In their fifteen years together, the duo have built a solid reputation in the New York advertising community with the thriving full-service audio production company that bears their name. Their sprawling 11,000 square foot production complex in Midtown Manhattan picturesquely overlooks the lights on Broadway and now serves the biggest names in advertising (i.e. MTV, VH-1, Diet Coke, Mercedes-Benz) with state of the art sound production facilities, casting, recording, and mixing services. Everything from a voice-over to a jingle to a full commercial spot can be produced here, and the caliber of talent walking their halls daily is impressive, to say the least. In recent years, as their success in the audio field has grown, the Kamen's have diversified to incorporate multimedia services like CD-ROM technology and web-site development, and have begun to focus more on music production, adding dance and video production studios to their already sizable facilities. "Technically, we're pretty much advanced here," says Roy Kamen, an audio engineer by trade who's been in the industry for over twenty years now. "It's the closest I'm ever going to get to the Enterprise!" Last year, they consolidated their three previously separate though complimentary companies - Kamen Audio Productions, CDA Interactive, and MK Music - into the all-encompassing Kamen Entertainment Group, in order to better serve all of their clients' needs. At the same time, the pair finally found themselves in a position to do something they've always wanted to do--start a record label. "The one area we never really went after was the record work," Kamen explains. "Financially and technically we can support it now, and Marina finally has enough time on her hands to devote 100% to writing and recording and pushing the music. Marina was a performer before I met her; she pretty much put her performing on the back burner when I asked her to marry me, and she moved off to the studio side. Finally now we can start moving out into other areas of entertainment---and her area of expertise is singing and writing and producing music. That was her whole life before she met me. And now we're using everything that we've developed in servicing the ad community to promote and record her music." Marina Kamen is indeed the creative backbone of the fledgling MRK label. A singer, songwriter, and producer who cut her teeth in the dance club scene of the 70's and '80's, Marina is already being hailed as the "All-American Euro Queen" due to the early critical success of her first two singles, a synth-heavy HI-NRG rendition of the timeless Italo-dance gem "Ti Amo" (with Flambe), and her dynamic disco-ish cover of the Bobby Freeman classic "Do You Wanna Dance?" which features a rap by Kraze. A classically trained vocalist who's concentrated mostly on jingles and commercial voice-overs in recent years, Marina's already got twelve tracks (currently available on MRK's promotional sampler) recorded towards her debut album---ranging from contemporary Europop gems like the aforementioned singles to the '80's era sounding Hi-NRG of "Silent Night" and "Rocket To Your Heart" to lush down tempo grooves like "Cryin Time Again"--which the label hopes to have out by the beginning of next year. "Marina is just constantly working, cranking out music, one to two songs a week, Kamen boasts about his wife. But why HI-NRG, you may be wondering? "We hired Tony Marinello, from (the legendary Hi-NRG producer) Bobby O.'s camp," Kamen explains. "He worked for a long time with Bobby in the '80's and early '90's doing track work--he's one of the main reasons we went in the Euro direction. We've experimented with other styles of music over the years, but this one seems to have taken hold. And coming from the whole club scene of the "70's and '80's, it was a natural shift for Marina. We're looking at other artists and other styles, once the full album comes out. We'll be sliding into R&B and some other dance styles. We're not going to stick in one genre. We have plenty of studio space to record a lot of material. And Marina is well versed in all styles of music, so if she's not the artist, she'd like to be producing a lot of diverse material. "MRK is unique as an American dance music label not only in their choice of Europop as their starting point, but also in their varied marketing/promotional attack. "One of the things that differentiates us from other labels is how we're using the internet," Kamen continues. "Everybody's putting up websites, and we have a great one, but that's not what 1 mean. When I'm not in the studio engineering, running the business, I'm on the net, actively marketing Marina and the label. In the past three months we've gotten on to every Eurodance page out around the world, and because of that we've been able to attract the attention of major publications like Streetsound and yourselves without having to hit the road once. And one of the things we got from the net was, 'Holy Toledo, this stuff is coming out of the US!" Most Euro music is coming out of Canada or Europe-this was the feedback we got right off the bat. So we picked up on it as our marketing hook, right off the web." "It just goes hand in hand with more traditional record promotion," inserts Josefa Seoane, who heads up promotions at MRK. "We do the pools, the press, the mixshows, and the radio stations, but we've also extended it to the web, where we reach the ultimate consumer. The difference is that the results are much quicker, and maybe not as jaded." Seoane brings to MRK her years of experience in the ,industry dealing with genres as diverse as acid jazz, trip hop, techno and rap; her resume includes a recent stint at George Acosta's Waxhead label, where she played a role in the success of his Planet Soul project, and before that, with Micmac Records, where she handled not only the more underground material of the Adrenaline label but also the more bubble gum pop and freestyle of Micmac's roster. "Sometimes Roy and I, argue, about different mixes on a song. I'm aware of the different DJs, and my thinking is, you never want to stop someone from playing your music. If you have strawberry jam, you can put it on bread or a cracker, but it's still the same thing. It's still the same song, just different mixes." "I like radio," Kamen retorts jovially. "Get on the radio a lot, sell a lot of records. Coming down from the Billboard Summit, I heard a lot about the need for dance to crossover to radio. And with all the heavy club music, that's not going to cut it. What's going to crossover is the Gina G., La Bouche-- Europop. It's my belief that we're headed towards a tremendous party in the year 2000. One of the reasons dance is experiencing a resurgence is that there's this looking forward, very optimistically, to the future. We see it in the economy, in the health of the cities and the country, the breaking down of barriers around the world - the Internet is like a symptom of it. And I just see this tremendous party, and the music that will accompany it is dance music. For dance music to crossover to mainstream pop radio, I think Europop is going to be a big player - freestyle, the happy bouncy radio song like we used to listen to." "I think the ultimate goal," Seoane adds, "is that you want that farmer in Arkansas who's sucking on a piece of straw to sing your music. That's the ultimate cross over. The Macarena was a perfect example--when the Vice President of the US is doing the dance, you know you have reached the masses. And I think that's why we both get so involved so much in the internet, because you do reach the masses. It's an effective way to do that without all the politics." So far, it seems this multi-pronged promotional attack is working. "Ti Amo" and "Do You Wanna Dance" have received numerous accolades by the internet Hi-NRG dance community, "Do You Wanna Dance" is fast rising on Streetsound Magazine's HI-NRG Hot 40 Chart (currently #9), and it has also been added to WIDR, one of the top intemet radio stations. With this very early success, the barely eight month old MRK Records has really begun to establish itself as a leader in American-made Eur-NRG dance music. Visit Kamen Entertainment's web site www.kamen.com or contact MRK Recorts at 212-575-4660 |
