About Gabriel & Dresden
Gabriel & Dresden is an American electronic music duo comprising Josh Gabriel and Dave Dresden, formed in San Francisco, California. They collaborated from 2001 to 2008, then again from 2011 to the present. During that time, they have created numerous hit songs and remixes, some of which are considered classics. They won the coveted Winter Music Conference IDMA award for "Best American DJ" twice, in 2007 and 2008, the latter time on the same day that the group split up. The pair reunited in early 2011 and proceeded on a reunion tour, which began at Ruby Skye in San Francisco on March 4, 2011. They produced three studio albums together: self-titled album , The Only Road which was released after an 11-year hiatus period, and Remedy .
Dave Dresden's musical ability was developed through 15 years DJing prior to forming the group, while Josh Gabriel has an undergraduate college degree in music composition from the California Institute for the Arts.
Dave's love for music was influenced by a local 1980's Westchester County, New York nightclub located in Banksville, New York called Krypton's. DJ Ralphie Gomez, the club's longtime resident DJ , played an eclectic mixture of new wave and early industrial music that drew crowds to this popular back road rural night spot. He also was inspired by watching a pre-fame Moby DJ at a teen club in Greenwich, Connecticut, called The Cafe. One night while dancing at Krypton's to Anne Clark's "Wallies", Dave decided to be a DJ.
Dave's first gig was at Marty & Lenny's, a nightclub in New Rochelle, NY where the owners of the then predominantly freestyle music venue promoted a new music night. The night was promoted by Long Island's 92.7 WDRE, and Dave's eponymous DJ name "Dave the Wave" started to earn him recognition amongst fans of new wave, alternative and industrial dance music. From there, he landed a long-standing residency at BAR in New Haven, CT which lasted for over ten years. This helped him to land a spot reporting his top tracks to the Hot Dance Club Songs chart in Billboard, a highly touted, and difficult title to earn amongst DJs in the US with only 95 DJs in total submitting their weekly charts. Dave also worked in many other facets of the music industry including radio, A&R, journalism and club promotions.
Josh started experimenting with synthesizers and computers in the early 1980s, achieving mastery of the Yamaha DX7 and TX816 by the age of 17. With an Apple Macintosh Plus, and the earliest of music applications like Mark of the Unicorn's "Composer" and "Performer", Josh was already on the bleeding edge. In the Netherlands, Gabriel's inventor spirit took shape as he wrote a computer application to control samples on an Akai S900 in real-time with a joystick. With this, the inception for what later became Mixman was born. Along with electronics whiz Jan Panis, Gabriel built an apparatus which converted beams of light coming up off the floor into a MIDI control device and the 20-year-old Gabriel dressed in black, wearing white gloves performed his real-time beat-trigger device in the clubs of Amsterdam. Josh attended the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands and earned his degree from California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. He founded the music creation tool Mixman in the 1990s, which was the first program to make music using loops of digital audio. Gabriel's patents for loop-based music remixing are the backbone of industry standard music making software applications used in virtually every producer's studio today.
Dave met Pete Tong whilst he was the music director of Swedish Egil's grooveradio.com in 2000. By 2001 Dave was working for Pete as a scout looking for new music for his radio show Essential Selection and label FFRR. At the Miami Winter Music Conference in March 2001 Dave struck up a conversation with Josh at a party being hosted by grooveradio.com after seeing Josh hand DJ Leon Alexander a copy of his first vinyl record called "Wave 3". Dave liked the track so much gave it to Pete who immediately played it the next week on the Essential Selection and also used it for his compilation Twisted Beats. A few months later, as a thank you for the work he had done, Pete offered Dave the opportunity to do a remix of New Order's Someone Like You and Dave asked Josh to work on it with him.
Dave and Josh officially joined forces later in 2001 and quickly made a name for themselves by creating numerous remixes for artists as diverse as Tiësto, Paul Oakenfold, Sarah McLachlan, Way Out West, Annie Lennox, Duncan Sheik, and Jewel. In 2002 Gabriel & Dresden released "Lament" on Satoshi Tomiie's Saw Recordings imprint, their first single. The first Gabriel & Dresden gig was Arc in New York City.
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