Gabriel Sandler

Gabriel Sandler (or Gabe Sandler) was introduced to electronic music from the sounds of heart monitors and respirators in a neonatal intensive care unit in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was born in 1979. With an eidetic memory, the images, sounds and rhythms of machines would recur often in Gabriel's dreams, compiling the sounds, samples, and intensity of his near-death experience during his first pensive year. Early audio recordings conducted by his parents as part of a sociological experiment verify Gabriel's proclivity for rote memorization of images, sounds and tones, and in 1982, when he was two years old, Gabriel performed his first original song with the emphatic chorus "I want some pennies." After moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1983, Gabriel was soon exposed to a new world of music from a clock radio his parents inadvertently left in his room. Sandler would often stay up all night, secretly listening to innovative Detroit radio DJs like the Electrifyin' Mojo, the Wizard (Jeff Mills) and Gary Chandler, whose nightly broadcasts would captivate audiences with new artists and sounds that challenged the mainstream. Inspired by the electronic rhythms and live-mixing styles of Mills and Chandler, and the rapidly-flourishing alternative rock movement in the early-1990s, Sandler produced his first track and music video in 1992 as part of a school project using a nascent version of ProTools, movie samples, and a Fender Guitar. He took up DJing a year later by splicing together cassettes into mix-tapes, but the serendipitous discovery of several thousand vinyl records while dumpster-diving in 1993 launched him immediately into the world of vinyl collecting and DJing. He is now known as both a DJ and Producer, performing marathon sets that blend records of all genres, from gospel to country to metal to rap; all with a house, techno and electro groove. His live production is best described as an intentional manipulation of standards and best practices, utilizing a full library of lost-and-found, damaged-and-repaired sounds. Sandler has performed all over the world, on several major continents (including the first-ever professional DJ set in Antarctica), and has worked and performed with legends of many genres, including Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, Richie Hawtin, Tiësto, Paul Van Dyk, LTJ Bukem, Juan Atkins, John Acquaviva, Egyptian Lover, and Jesse Saunders. He hosted two of Texas' most popular electronic music radio shows (MK Ultra and a weekly live club broadcast on WKLB), and has been involved in several studio production projects in Houston, Texas and Detroit, Michigan. His latest studio project, Autoclave (http://www.autoclavemusic.com), has been challenging the norms of electronic music since March of 2012. "We are not just pushing the envelope, we are pushing the entire post office," says Sandler, whose intentions are as plain as day: to create new sounds and ideas that destroy all notions of genre and classification in electronic music.