Dynamic Duo

You may remember Josh Gabriel as the inventor of the remixing wunderapp, Mixman. Truly revolutionary in the ’90s, Mixman still resonates in the music tech industry in the form of modern loop tools like Propellerhead ReCycle and Ableton Live. Josh is one of the few luminaries in the electronica scene who not only knows how to use every synth known to man, but knows how to build them in software as well.

Club aficionados will likely recall that Dave Dresden was the go-to guy for the prestigious compilation and DJ pool label, Promo Only. As if that weren’t enough, he was also a trusted colleague and scout for legendary uber-DJ, Pete Tong. Dave is most definitely a DJ’s DJ, always at the bleeding edge of the dance music scene, spinning nascent hits months before the rest of the club world gets their hands on them.

As it happens, I’ve known Josh for years and had the pleasure of remixing G&D’s Top 10 single, “Tracking Treasure Down” last spring (you can read about how I did it in the July issue). With their eponymous debut album tearing up the club charts on both sides of the pond, I jumped at the chance to hang with them when their club tour passed through Austin.

You’ve had several other side projects such as Andain and the hugely successful Motorcycle. What was the inspiration to drop the pseudonyms and make a complete album under your own name?

G: We wanted to focus on what was driving us creatively, and we realized that in order to do that we had to take everything away except us. We wanted to just make music for ourselves with nobody else to ask questions, so we took a year off and just made music.

D: I’ve seen albums where the producer was more in the forefront than the artist. Without previous efforts, there was always this confusion at our gigs, with people asking, “What’s Andain? What’s Motorcyle?” These were just pseudonyms and it wasn’t really helping us.

G: We were sick of being in the fine print. [Laughs.]

How were the songs on the new album conceived and produced?

G: With the vocalists, we’d just have fun in the studio. We’d come up with the lyrics and music together with them, letting our ears be the guide. For the instrumental tracks, Dave and I worked together to develop music that really represented where we wanted to go, creatively speaking.

D: It just feels better when you write a song with the singer. You don’t have to produce it with the singer. But writing it with them is so important because they bring their personality to the lyrics.

How did you go about matching the vocalist to the track?

G: There are only two lead vocalists. Molly Bancroft is the female vocalist on four tracks and Jan Burton is the male on another four, and then there are three instrumentals. This is why we collaborated with each vocalist. Certain vocalists sound okay with certain lyrics and others don’t. What sounds cheesy with one person sounds perfectly fine with another person’s voice.

D: We just didn’t want to do the “mail order bride” vocalist thing.

And you guys are doing background vocals.

D: Yeah. We’ve discovered that our voices have a little soul in them, with a bit of tinkering. [Laughs.] But the process also starts with just finding people. This album truly is “a year in the life of Gabriel & Dresden.” These are the people we came across and collaborated with. These are the opportunities that came to us. And we got really lucky with two really talented vocalists.

“Dust In The Wind” by Kansas? You took that track to a completely new place.

G: We decided we wanted to do a cover that meant something to us today, lyrically, yet was still timeless. Most importantly, it had to sound stylistically like something we would have written ourselves.

D: It was important that it be a song that came from a scene that we were not acknowledged to be a part of.

G: The other cover we considered was “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden.

D: But that felt like something our audience might actually expect from us. “Dust In The Wind” was the first song that — as a child — I ever recognized the lyrics to and understood what they meant. Just when you think everything is so huge, you realize that it’s only a blip in the scheme of things, although the world will go on. For me it was even kind of a tribute to 9/11. And Molly just felt our vibe with that. We just pretty much hit record and the vocals were done.

Each of you approaches music from a different perspective. Josh is a keyboardist. Dave, a DJ. How did you split the creative duties?

G: I think at this point, we know how to work together so well that we feel like a two-headed monster. I push for new creative, technical ideas — a new sound or new way of doing things — and while I’m working on the computer, Dave has a DJ rig next to the computer. He actually DJs, playing tracks as I work. We listen to how things feel against what I’m doing and get inspiration from that.

So he DJs in real time as you program?!?

G: Sometimes it’s inspiration. Sometimes we grab a sample.

D: It feels like my way of putting a time-stamp on something. DJing the tracks that I love right at that moment and blending them with what you’re working on right then and there. It’s an interesting way of writing club music.

G: One time Dave was playing a comedy album on top of a track I was developing, and we liked the audience clapping, so we sampled it and added it to the track.

D: It gives a feeling that you’ll never find in a sample CD, like [the clappers] are in a speakeasy or something.

A lot of the tracks have a slightly retro vibe, without necessarily sounding like you’re jumping on the ’80s nostalgia bandwagon. Is that intentional? What was the inspiration?

G: It’s definitely intentional. We both grew up listening to Depeche Mode, The Cure, New Order, and all those bands, so those are all in our blood. We basically adhere to a similar principle, so our music ends up having a similar vibe. Harmonically speaking, our music tends to be sad and euphoric at the same time. Rhythmically, we like to keep the beats simple and not dress them up too much. We like to use synths that either sound like they’re from the ’80s, or were around in that time period. Just because they sound right to us.

D: In the end, it really just stems from the fact that this was the sound when we fell in love with music.

Josh, your synth textures are often either analog and organic, or richly textured and effected. What's your approach to each?

G: I just think of these sounds as feelings and shapes. The more organic sounds have less fuss and muss, and they end up creating warmth and giving a track life. The ones that are more effected create a shape in my mind. All the effects create a very distinct texture that allow them to morph from tiny to huge in sort of a smooth way. It’s like picking extremes, so that your ideas are clear. Either something is simple and muted — or else it goes to the moon. And there’s no middle ground, if that makes sense.

D: Actually, this album was the first time we worked with an analog synth in our career, the Moog Voyager.

G: That ended up generating a lot of the sounds on this record, including the synths in “Dust In the Wind.”

D: Yeah, you should have heard that track before we got the Moog. It was originally a summery, kind of Todd Terry “Missing” type of track. And then we added the Moog to get a bassline, and Josh started getting this weird synth riff and I’m like, “Dude! Keep doing that!” From there we ended up starting a lot of the rest of the tracks by just screwing around with the Voyager, recording everything.

Many of our readers are familiar with your live DJ sets, where both of you are working simultaneously using Live to transcend the boundaries of standard DJ techniques. Dave, you used to be a staunch vinyl junkie, yet you’ve made the jump to silicon. What prompted the move?

D: Actually, that’s a bit of a misconception. I always hated vinyl because of my parent’s turntable, which never worked right. I actually was one of the first clubbing DJs to spin CDs back in ’89 with a pair of the original Technics CD turntables. People looked at me like I had three heads. And then when we started working together, Josh said he wanted to gig with a laptop, and I looked at him like he had three heads. But I caught myself and realized that what he was suggesting was no different than what I did when I was younger. And when Josh showed me Ableton Live, I thought, “Oh my God, this is even better.”

Do you plan to do any live gigs with this material?

G: We haven’t figured out the right way to do that. But we just saw LCD Soundsystem play in Brazil.

D: That show was an epiphany for me, cause I never imagined myself on a stage playing anything besides a DJ rig. LCD Soundsystem made me feel — for the first time — like that was something I could do.

It seems like modern dance music and electronica are in a regrouping phase where sounds and styles are being reshuffled into whatever the next big thing will be. What are your thoughts on the scene these days?

G: There are two things that immediately come to mind: Indie rock and minimal techno.

D: I recently got XM Radio and listening to the indie rock stations I heard Postal Service, “Such Great Heights.” It made me feel like there is a place for all this music that we were hearing in our heads, after all these years. Real songs and real modern electronic music, coming together in an amazing way. I said to Josh, “I think the future of dance music is coming through the rock scene.” And it seemed like a crazy statement at the time, but now more than ever, the people who like us like these new rock bands, too.