Gabriel & Dresden:
Setting the Music Free
Dance music is trapped and Gabriel & Dresden want to set it free. “Dance music was connected with disco and it never really recovered,” says Dave Dresden. “Then it became techno in the ’90s and that really turned a lot of people off. The music didn’t have words and so it became a sub-cultural music for people in clubs.”
“People have come to expect that dance music is devoid of meaning,” says Josh Gabriel. “We make music with lyrics and choruses, music that is emotive with melodies and meaning.”
“We make songs that make you feel good about feeling bad,” says Dave Dresden. Photo by Tilmann Schaal.
Those lyrics and catchy choruses are the key to letting dance music loose among the general population. Gabriel & Dresden’s tracks explore age-old universal themes like love and loss, pain and ecstasy. They’re songs that anyone can relate to — they just happen to be driven by pounding, contagious dance rhythms. “We think of ourselves as a band that uses dance music to express ourselves,” says Gabriel. “Both of us grew up with Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Duran Duran, and our music harkens back to that harmonic kind of feeling.”
“We make songs that make you feel good about feeling bad,” says Dresden.
The San Francisco-based duo recently completed its first self-titled album, a collection of tracks that hover between heartfelt pop and heavy dance. They worked with two world-class vocalists, hordes of electronic processors, and Logic Pro running on a Power Mac G5.
Jam Session
Gabriel & Dresden summon up their tracks in a collaborative séance that involves a Power Mac, a bevy of musical instruments, and a pair of CD decks. “I’m usually sitting in front of the computer and Dave is on the DJ setup,” says Gabriel. “I might find a kick drum that I think is going to suit what we’re working on and Dave just plays whatever comes to mind. When something piques our interest, we take note of it. It influences our direction and the choices that we are going to make. We just keep going back and forth like that as the song progresses.”
The two manage to meld their relatively different musical backgrounds — Gabriel is a professionally trained musician and composer while Dresden is self-taught — with great effect. Gabriel mans drum kits, keyboards, guitar, and bass. Dresden uses his expertise as a DJ to sculpt tracks. When they need to add an instrument or a voice, they record it live. “We record everything directly into Logic using a MOTU box,” says Gabriel. “I’ll play electric bass and a lot of the guitar stuff and when we need vocals, we work with a singer. We record all the vocals with a Studio Projects microphone, run it through a preamp and a tube compressor. It’s a very simple chain for recording live vocals, but it works wonderfully.”
Not all Gabriel & Dresden sounds and licks are recorded live. They regularly depend on hardcore effects processing and editing to achieve their sound. “I collect percussion instruments from all over the world,” says Gabriel, “but we sample all sorts of things. For example, we were making music and we decided to take a break and listen to a comedy bit. We liked the audience applause and we sampled it right there. That kind of flow — being able to grab things like that — is very important to us.”
