When I showed an acquaintance the artwork for Joshua Gabriel’s new CD, the immodestly titled Movement No. 2: Rebel for the New Millennium, he frowned at the microscopic squiggles, faces, dollar signs and mathematical symbols–Keith Haring crossed with electronics diagrams–that filled the sleeve, calling it "pretty obsessive."
Gabriel’s art, in whatever medium, consists of giving his obsessions free rein (a track on his first CD and his award-winning short film are both titled "Get Addicted"). Gabriel says he thinks that "the work shows I’m definitely an obsessive-compulsive person. The music tracks are thought out to an insane degree. The drawings are tiny, tiny little things filling up a big space."
Like much electronic music, Gabriel’s employs samples from a staggeringly broad range of genres–operatic vocals, shimmering harps, Chinese, Indian, soul and funk. These are mixed, layered and looped with his own contributions on drums, guitar, bass and turntables. But Gabriel’s music isn’t an exercise in eclecticism, nor is it a collage or a pastiche. It’s distinguished by the rigors of its construction, and those rigors are clearly audible. You can hear his obsessive sensibility at work as each sound is milked for every possibility it contains, repeated again and again–to a beat–until it’s transformed in the listener’s mind; decayed, delayed, embellished with echoes and otherwise tweaked. Seemingly exhausted, a sound source–girlish voices singing a folk song in a foreign language, for example–will disappear only to return again in a perfectly synchronized and, for the listener, almost physically anticipated manner.
Gabriel’s songs are structured with a regularity and symmetry like that of classical music, probably reflecting his childhood and teenage training in classical piano and guitar. The schematics he provides on the back of the CDs–section titles like "I-I-I-I-I-I-I love you" or "uh!!! Dr. breakdown"–are basically just descriptive, with the "Dr." meaning drums. Vocalists stammer and stutter (I-I-I, uh-uh-uh) while other samples skitter across the bed of beats like dragonflies on a pond. A listener can actually use the titles to figure out where he is in the song or piece. While this may sound incredibly nerdy, it’s part of what gives the work an old-school hiphop feel. The textures are spare, even minimalistic–you could call Gabriel a hiphop Steve Reich–but while he uses few sounds, he’s doing more with each of them, working them harder. This music demands and inspires close attention, heightening the listener’s awareness of what, sonically speaking, goes into even the simplest of utterances. As Gabriel says, "It’s not dance stuff, it’s sit-down-and-listen stuff. Like Pink Floyd or something, sit down with the headphones. At the same time, it’s got a groove and you can dance to it if you want to, and it’s definitely inspired by a lot of dance music. But it’s not go-crazy-at-the-club music."
So where are the outlets for it? Recently Gabriel spun and displayed some art at 85A, and he has an upcoming show of art and music at CB’s 313 Gallery. He also did a daytime set at CMJ that won him a lot of new fans. But generally, he says, "I take shows where I can get them. I’ve been playing a lot of colleges lately and that’s a good format for me. I’m trying to make a market for myself, but it’s hard… I send my CDs to a magazine and they’re like, ‘Is it house? Is it hiphop?’ There’s generally a page for experimental or abstract music," but, as even the most casual listener can attest, there’s nothing abstract about Gabriel’s music, which is pretty funky and beats-oriented. "It’s experimental and I don’t think I’m working in a genre, but I try to make it a little bit accessible. It’s not avant-garde noise stuff, some of it is even catchy in a weird way. More like DJ Shadow, Tricky, DJ Krush."
After his early classical training Gabriel played guitar in punk bands and then took up the drums. But by the time he got out of college (art school in his native Philadelphia) he "started to think that band music wasn’t really where it was at." This was influenced, of course, by the obsessiveness–"I kind of needed to work alone"–but also by what he was hearing around him. "At that time–and this idea has since changed–hiphop was so good in that period. It was like early Wu-Tang Clan, Gang Starr–I bought turntables thinking that a lot of the best producers were DJs. DJ Premier, Pete Rock, a lot of the drum and bass guys." When he came to New York four years ago Gabriel started hanging out at Konkrete Jungle, the long-running drum and bass party, and "I started watching the DJs. My idea with the turntables was originally just to get okay at it, just enough to sort of incorporate those ideas into whatever I was doing, but I started to practice and practice and I started to get good at it… Having some musical training made it an easy transition."
Despite hiphop’s artistic decline as it reached its commercially successful apex–and that decline being accompanied by the emergence of a new crop of exciting bands–Gabriel still isn’t overly taken with the band music he hears around him. He prefers classic groups like the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix and the Who. (A self-indulgent yet charming interlude on Rebel features him and his brothers debating which Beatles album is the best.) "I still think the innovative things being done in music are mostly DJ stuff, producer-driven stuff, but I’ve kind of gone back now and I love everything. I like Oasis. There’s always good musical stuff being done in all forms."
I asked Gabriel how his compulsive tendencies translate into a live show. Does his work get looser? After all, this is a man who once battled and defeated a computer-controlled robot DJ at the Compound warehouse in Brooklyn. His response: "The way the tracks [on the CD] are set up, they call for me to improvise. There are parts that are just improvised, maybe the drum track was there beforehand, but that’s it. With the DJ stuff too, there’s stuff that’s planned, routines that I do, but 50 percent of it is improvised. Scratching…is like playing a horn in jazz, like you’re soloing over the other song. So the work is obsessive and detailed and crafted, but it starts with improvising."
There’s something unmistakably urban about the sensibility that runs through all of Gabriel’s work, and this, too, puts him in touch with the heritage of hiphop. Despite plenty of rhymes about dealing and shooting, the sound of most commercial hiphop has grown increasingly plush and luxurious. Gabriel’s work, with its touches of sitars and snippets of what could be overheard music or conversation, seems a little more "street" in a literal, not roughneck, sense. This can be seen in his film, Video 1: Get Addicted, where the camera pans over models on billboards and mannequin torsos in shop windows. Gabriel graffitis his drawings on an ad on the side of a phone booth and walks down a winter street making turntable-spinning motions with his hands.
There’s an element of social commentary to his work: as he says of his drawings, many of which are done on the bare torsos of models in photos from the Victoria’s Secret catalog, "as a man you’re seeing these pictures of these beautiful women that are shot perfectly and you’re going to have a reaction to that. It’s a little disturbing, though, that you walk around Times Square and there’s like 60-story women in underwear. I love these pictures of these women but I kind of hate them, too, because I don’t want to walk around being constantly titillated."
Sensory overload is part of the urban experience; Gabriel’s music and art are his attempt at revenge, at imprinting himself on the chaos, whether very literally (the drawings) or more subtly, with the imposing of new structures and new contexts on music and sounds. (At one point in our interview he referred to the people on the records he uses as his "collaborators"–though he’s careful also to note that he’s increasingly using sounds generated from his own live playing.) Back when hiphop was mostly on sound systems and boomboxes, it also was an attempt to reclaim the urban environment. "Human vs. Machine" (as Gabriel’s battle against DJ I-Robot was called) indeed.
Filtering, digesting and restructuring what he’s heard is Gabriel’s m.o. He describes being at rave parties a few years back: "They’d have different rooms, there’d be a house room, a drum and bass room, a hiphop room. I’d check out all the rooms, I kind of liked what was going on in all of them, and those ideas came out when I started doing my own stuff."
Joshua Gabriel’s music and art will be showcased Sat., Dec. 29, at CB’s 313 Gallery, 313 Bowery (Bleecker St.), 677-0455.
