WINTER KILLS - video clips, songs, albums online

Josh Gabriel is an 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. Gabriel's patents for loop-based music remixing are the backbone of industry standard music making software applications used in virtually every producers studio today. By 1999, Mixman had evolved and grown and merged with a larger dot.com. Expanding briefly to the Mac platform and deepening it’s relationship with Record Labels and MTV as well as starting work with Mattel on a controller (eventually became the DM2) -- things looked good. But as happened with many dot.coms the ride got bumpy. In late 2000 Gabriel decided he had had his fill of the corporate life, and decided he wanted to return to “music”. In 2002 Mixman sprung free of the dot.com shackles and returned to independence.