Josh Gabriel

Josh Gabriel
Josh Gabriel (front) as Gabriel & Dresden at Coachella Festival, Indio, California. April 20, 2006.
Background information
Birth name	Josh Gabriel
Origin	San Francisco, California, United States
Genres	Progressive trance, electronica
Occupation(s)	DJ, Producer, Remixer
Years active	1988–present
Labels	Organized Nature, Different Pieces, Vandit
Associated acts	Gabriel & Dresden, Motorcycle, Andain, Bigtop, Copywrite (rapper)

Josh Gabriel is an American electronic dance music DJ and producer, most known for his collaborative partnership Gabriel & Dresden with Dave Dresden.

In 1988-89, a 20-year-old exchange student from California Institute of the Arts, was living in The Hague in The Netherlands and studying at the Institute of Sonology. Josh Gabriel had already been working with digital music since his high-school days, achieving mastery of the DX7 and TX816 by the age of 17. With an Apple Macintosh Plus, operating system 3, and the earliest of music applications like Mark of the Unicorn's "Composer" and "Performer", Josh was already at 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. And the inception for what later became Mixman had been born. Along with electronics whiz Jan Pannis, (Stockhausen's tech-man) Gabriel and Pannis 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.

By 1993 Gabriel was doing high-end digital sound editing, design and production in Los Angeles, and finally found a business partner and the journey that was to become Mixman began. Mixman had always been conceived as a hardware device, the "Walkman", the "Discman", the "Mixman"… and several proto-types were built. The path to hardware was longer than software and in late 1995 early 1996 the first Mixman application was released to the public. Spin Control, included 8 songs from the San Francisco underground Dance Music scene, that were remixable with only a PC, enough RAM and a proper sound card.