For a decade Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker has released music on labels such as Sound In Color, his own Gifted & Blessed imprint, Eglo Records, and more recently Wild Oats. On every record and with a multitude of names his work ethic and ability to carve out ear-perking synthetic melodies has shown through. Ahead of his appearance this Friday at Tape we spoke with him under his most widely known alias Gifted & Blessed. Our conversation touched on how his upbringing and siblings shaped the types of music he listens to and creates today, as well as his constant struggle to remain free from tags or pigeonholing genres. Having come up with some of LA’s finest producers and musicians, Whittaker has worked vehemently to distinguish himself as more than a beat maker or analogue music aficionado and so far has succeeded by masking himself in layers of aliases. If anything became clear in our chat it’s that he prizes his freedom – in music and in life. His tour schedule has led to a production spontaneity many musicians strive for, but have difficulties executing – making quality music on the road. His plans for this year are exactly what you would expect from a ego-free musician – release more music, tour, and enjoy life, which includes a move to New Mexico.
For the people who don’t know too much about you can tell us what your musical background is? “Well, I started putting out records maybe 10 years ago, and in about 2003 I put out my first stuff. A lot of my early music was released on a label called Sound In Color that was based in LA. It had a good run – myself and a few other beatmakers came out of there like Exile, Gaslamp Killer, Mumbles, and a bunch of folks. Since then I’ve put out a bunch of records through my own Gifted & Blessed label. Dimension Unknown has been the physicalization arm for a few of those releases and I’ve put out some things with Rush Hour, All City, Eglo, and a few other folks.”
From a few other interviews we’ve learned that you’re really into jazz music, what about that type of music is so appealing to you? “With music in general it has to emote something real for me to really have an interest in. With electronic music anybody can be a musician – you just install some music software on a laptop and you can call whatever you’re doing music; that’s cool and there’s definitely something for everybody there, but I think expressing something real and doing that at a high level of musical understanding, comes through in music like jazz. That’s been a real interest of mine for a long time, before I was even making music per say. It’s not only jazz; I’m very into classical music and really just music from around the world. Whatever’s speaking something that’s real for me.”
Do you find it difficult to discover music that you can connect with now? “No, I think within any era you have good music and mediocre music. I think that’s the same now as it ever was, except now there seems to be an over abundance of music unlike ever before because anybody can make music and anyone can have a label or release music themselves. There’s a ton of music out there and I guess that makes it harder in a sense that you have to dig through more things in order to find real authentic stuff. I don’t necessarily think it’s more rare now than it has been before; there’s always folks doing something fresh in any era.”
Since you come from such a different background how did you get involved with electronic music? “I think the sounds of different synthesizers have always caught my ear. I remember being a little kid and different things like playing video games or watching movies with ill soundtracks like John Carpenter movies. A lot of stuff that was happening in the 80s revolved around synthesized sounds and that always jumped out to me, even in pop music like Phil Collins for example. I remember being a little kid, maybe four years old, and hearing Phil Collins’ joints where he’s using Roland drum machines and sequential circuit synthesizers and those sounds always stuck. Then I got older and I had a brother who lived in Paris for a little while and when he was there he would send me a lot of tapes of the new electronic music that was coming up – house, jungle, and things like that. At about age nine or so I really started to get into that sound, again it kind of harkened back to those synthesizer sounds I was hearing when I was a younger kid. That’s kind of how I started getting into electronic music, but it’s been an evolution from there into other styles of electronic music. Even now I’m always hearing new kinds of music that maybe I wasn’t familiar with prior, but it just comes down to those sounds that kind of harken back to the time I was born.” Nine years old? That’s really early to get into electronic music. “For sure, I remember really bugging out with what the 4hero guys where doing back in the day as Tom & Jerry. It just really stood out to me – that early jungle; I just thought it was so wild.”
Besides Tom & Jerry who were some of the other artists you were listening to when you were young? “When I was really young – Prince would definitely be one that stands out as an obvious one for me for electronic music, Zapp & Rodger, even Parliament Funkadelic. Those were like the earliest synthesizer based sounds that I could identify with. I have a big family and all of my siblings are into different things, whether it was like Depeche Mode, New Order, and that kind of stuff. When I was really young I had siblings that were way older than me, so that was the kind of stuff that they were into. I had family into Stevie Wonder too. Aside from electronic music, jazz was always something kind of big in my household and Latin music as well – my mom always had salsa around me just because her family’s from Puerto Rico.”
If we round up all of your aliases you have a huge back-catalogue. When did you start making music? “It’s hard to say when I started. Anytime from being a young age and being around a piano or something I would always try to come up with my own sounds. Later it was guitar, bass, and the drums. As far as making electronic music or something that I actually felt like I could stand by as GB maybe when I was 15 or 14 years old in high school and slang them to kids at school. I did that pretty much all through high school.”
What’s your usual approach to starting a track? “It all depends on where I’m physically at, whether it’s my home studio or like right now, on the road, and I’m in a place where maybe a friend has a synthesizers and maybe a couple of cool pieces of gear, so I’ll approach it a different way than how I approach it at home. Generally speaking, originally I was using almost all samples for a lot of my early records and I was chopping stuff up in Cool Edit Pro, which later became Adobe Audition and I was also using acid, so it was all software based. In maybe 2003 when I started working on bringing more sounds together and playing more in my recordings I switched over to different kinds of synthesizers and was incorporating that with the samples. More recently, it’s kind of been no sampling and all hardware based. [My process] definitely has a bunch of synthesizers, drum machines, and hardware sequencers, so sometimes I never use software, sometimes it’ll just go straight to tape and I like that – not being able to edit it later. It’s convenient being able to edit in software, but there’s also something about the spontaneity factor of not using software. When I do use software like here on the road I’ll record into logic and a lot of times I’m just recording midi information and then I’ll send that out whatever hardware I’m using.” Do you do that often – work on the road and collaborate? “Yeah, whenever I can; I like to collaborate with folks when I’m on the road, that’s a fun process. I had the opportunity to do some stuff with FunkinEven when I was in London. I like to keep the creative juices flowing; it’s one thing to share the music every night, but it’s another to still keep it fresh and wanting to come up with new sounds even when I’m out of the comfort zone of my own studio space.”
You worked with a few a vocalists in the past. Are you still interested in incorporating vocals and working with vocalists? “I still work with vocalists often – I just released a project called The Steoples and that’s a collaboration with myself and A Race of Angels. That just came out. We did the vinyl for it maybe a month and half or two months ago. I’m working with a few other vocalists. I just did something with a singer named Kalela Mizanekristos who is also based in LA. She’s a really dope singer, so you’ll hear more stuff from us and other things come up all the time. There’s a lot of great vocalists who are friends of mine and are in my circle, so I definitely plan on doing more collaborations on that front.”
You seem pretty globally minded. Is there a particular city or country that you feel connected with? “Definitely LA because I’ve done most of my living in LA and grew up there for most part. LA is pretty much home for me in many ways. I’m actually moving out of LA again when I get back to the States. I’m moving to northern New Mexico. That’s definitely a place I feel connected to as well. The land is just a real special place. I’m really into sustainability, solar power, being off grid and those kinds of things, so I’m moving into a living situation of that sort. So I connect with those two places. I definitely connect with Puerto Rico because my mother’s there, my grandmother’s there, the family house is there, so Puerto Rico’s home as well. I appreciate having home in a lot of parts of the world.”
People tend to lump you into the beat scene and you mentioned how you came up with Gaslamp Killer. Are you involved with that aspect of the music world anymore? “I’m friends with those folks and we’re all connected. The community is not super huge in the sense that you still don’t share with cats. So yeah definitely, I always have a place there. As soon as I noticed that this beat thing started forming around what we were doing I kind of felt like it was time to back off a little bit and start doing other things because I didn’t want to get locked into anything. That’s part of why I use some many different aliases when I release music – it’s because as soon they want to pigeonhole you into something then you don’t have much of an opportunity to branch out and do other things without people being disappointed to some degree [by saying], “Oh wait, this doesn’t sound like the thing we got used to.” I feel like that started to happen. Even now with like the dance music stuff that has kind of begun to be an expectation as well, people are like “That’s GB – the analogue dance guy.” Again, that’s in there, but like I’ve explained with the type of music that I listen to, personally, it’s kind of boundless and want to still have that freedom in my own expression – not have to be bound to this sound that people expect.” That was a forward-thinking move on your part because we know a lot of people complain about how a year or two after they’ve released a couple of records they feel that they’re stuck. “Right, and who wants that? There are people who thrive at performing the same songs over and over, night after night for 200 nights out of a year. I commend those people, but I could never do that. I never want to get locked into any kind of expectations like that. I can’t determine how people are going to listen to my music, but I would hope that people will listen to it in the same way that I like to listen to music – I kind of like that element of surprise. I don’t want to know what to expect from the new record by so and so. That takes all of the fun out of it. If I wanted to be able to expect it I would just put on records they’ve already put out.”
Speaking of people knowing your sound and with the Super Bowl having just passed, we know you had an ad a while back in one of the games and you’ve done some other advertisements. Have you found that new people reach out because of your advertising work? “Oh yeah, definitely. That ad in particular, millions of people saw it and so people that would never think to investigate into the world of music that I do (they aren’t even looking in those directions) they hear something on the TV that’s catchy to them and they’ll dig it. That’s definitely opened up a larger interest in the music.”
On a completely different note, in past interviews you’ve hinted at working with Eglo again. Do you have any information on what that project will look like? Will it be another single or LP? “At the very least you can expect some stuff on a compilation that they’re putting out with tracks from the whole roster. There’s some exclusive music coming out on that.” When can we expect this? “In the next few months for sure. It’s being worked on.”
Toward the end of last year you released a record on Kyle Hall’s Wild Oats… “The Reflektor EP – that came out the last week of December. It was a real specialty pressing; it was on some weird material, it wasn’t even vinyl. We did a very limited number of them and now we’re getting ready to drop the full release, so it’s a mass pressing and that’s on regular black vinyl.” On Discogs it said each track was a tribute to the Mayan spiritual sites. Did you study ancient cultures or anything? It seems to run through a lot of your work, particularly the artwork. “I’ve had a definite interest in ancient cultures for many years. I didn’t necessarily study ancient cultures. What I did study was sociology and I guess you could say that’s related in dealing with people and culture is a part of that. I have a keen interest in the ancestral and that’s really from around the world. There’s something to me that’s very important about tradition. I don’t know what that looks like all the time and it doesn’t necessarily mean “my family has a tradition of doing this on this day” I don’t mean that per say, but I do mean a certain honoring what the ancestors have laid forth and that is a theme for me in a lot of my work. This particular record was a tribute to the Mayan sights and culture. I did have the privilege of being able to visit many of those sights a few years back and I was definitely profoundly impacted. There are a ton of other record that I have done which are in a similar vein – a kind of homage to another culture or spiritual discipline that derives from ancient cultures.”
Stream: The Reflektor – Las Ruinas Mayas (Wild Oats)
Going back to music that you’re into, we know you’re into a lot of older music, but is there anything new in particular that’s caught your ear? “A lot of my friends make music that I really like such as the vocalist I spoke of earlier Kalela. I’m really inspired by what she does. I like what FunkinEven does, Kyle and a lot of the folks around me. I always hear new music that I like, but most of it has nothing to do with the electronic music scene. Most of it is in a different world, whether it’s jazz – there’s a ton of new jazz right now that’s amazing. I just heard a really cool country-western and jazz combination that blew me away. There’s always new stuff that I dig.”
What else is in store for you this year? “I’m looking to repress a few things that have become pretty rare and that folks are always asking me about, so that’s probably gonna happen in the next few months. [Records] like “The Provider EP that I put out on my own label. I’m definitely going to be putting out another full length, which will be the first in a long time, so that’s the main focus for me right now. You’ll hear a few little side projects that I’m working on, just other means of expression. I’ve got some ambient things that have really been peaking my interest at the moment, so I’m really kind of focused there too. You’ll hear a mix of it all and more production for other people to.”
Okay, time for a couple speed round questions – let’s say your house is on fire, what’s the one record you would save? “One record!? Do other people have an easy enough time answering that? I don’t think I can answer that. If it was absolutely just one record, I would probably take one of my own. I’d probably take one of those Reflektor records that we just pressed up, just because we barely pressed any. That would probably be one of the more important ones to me.” With those Discogs prices we’d probably grab one of yours too. “I have a few parts of my collection that are kind of sacred for me, so it’d be like which crates would I take. One of them would be my main classical crate. I’d probably take my main world music crate and field recordings crate. Then I’d probably take a mix crate of jazz and my own shit. Hopefully, that never happens *knock on wood*”
If someone were to ask you to describe your work in three words what would you say? “I could do it in two, I would say Technoindigenous Studies.” Could you elaborate on that? “For me Technoindigenous studies basically implies the bridging of the technological with the ancestral, that’s what I aim for in my music.”
You’re on tour in Europe right now. How has the reception been so far? “It’s been great. People have been really enthusiastic. I played in a town just outside of Frankfurt called Giessen and that was amazing. It was probably one of the most hype shows so far; the people are just enthusiastic about good music and that matters. I’ve done some bigger gigs since I’ve been out, which have been great too. I played Benji B’s night Deviation in London before I left and a few other things, but just playing in these little, small spaces that aren’t normally clubs or bars with mad people in there who are just there to dance and are really into it has been great.”
You’re going to be in Amsterdam on the February 22nd to play at Tape. Have you ever played in the city or at that venue before? “Not at that venue. I did something really intimate last time I was in Amsterdam at my friend Stephen Serrato’s studio. He was living in the city at the time – he’s a graphic designer and did Flying Lotus’ last cover. We’re originally friends from LA. I was playing in Rotterdam and thought I should see what’s up. Then we decided to throw a little private party at his art studio. But no, nothing in an actual venue, so this will be the first time playing in a real venue.”
What can people expect from you during that gig? “Fortunately, they were gracious enough to let me use a few of local pieces, so they’ll be bringing some synthesizers and drum machines, so I’m really going to improv a lot of it. That’s maybe what part of it’s going to be, but I also have some other midi compositions I’ve been working on that I’d like to play through some of the synths that I can get my hands on while I’m there. It’ll be cool because normally I’m use to playing on my own pieces of gear so I kind of know what’s what, but it’ll be an interesting experience trying to figure out how this piece works and what midi channel this on. Trying to make myself familiar with these pieces on the day of will make it more spontaneous, so that’ll be fun. We’ll see how it goes.” That sounds a little risky. “Yeah, well it’s just part of it. That’s my process when I’m recording – I try to keep it spontaneous. Again, I don’t really go back to edit too much. I’ll just record whatever I did in the moment and let that speak for itself. I really don’t want the music to be pretentious by over thinking it. It is what it is. You’re right in saying it is risky, but hopefully it goes well.” Do you do play live often? “No, out here it’s been semi live – kind of a hybrid thing with a laptop and midi controller. When I’m out here it’s mainly DJing. Initially, I wanted to bring some pieces out that I could travel with, but it just didn’t work out in time to kind of plan all of that.”
*Edit: Gifted & Blessed will not be playing a live set this Friday, instead a DJ set*
Finally, what’s your drink of choice when you’re out? “I try to minimize my drinking when I’m on the road, just because I’m playing so many dates that it can be really taxing on the body and I try to stay healthy. My drink of choice ideally when I can get it is a combination of pineapple juice, aloe vera juice, and tequila.”
Stream: GB Presents: The Abstract Eye – Grandfather Fire (Eglo Records)
Catch Gifted & Blessed at Tape in Amsterdam on the 22nd of February.
