There is experimental music, and then there is gabecore! The semi-eponymous, semi-genre defining/establishing, and hashtag beknighted #gabecore is the debut album from electronic composer Gabriel Stern. He's only seventy-seven years young and brimming with ambition, filling his first outing so full of ideas that it surprises me that the surface tension of his mind was enough to contain his imagination long enough to get all of it recorded. If it hadn't, I could imagine his creativity simply selling like a psychic tidal wave and flooding the world in a techno-flavored surge biblical proportions. While Gabriel was initially trained as a pianist and a cellist, he transitioned to jazz flute and saxophone after moving to New York in the '70s. His interest in electronic music was evident early on though, as rumor has it that he developed an electronic saxophone in 1977 (no word on whether it was ever patented)! I'm sure the reasons that his debut LP dropped in December of 2020, instead of, say 1978, are legion upon legion. However, I'm positive that at least part of the explanation is that technology needed to catch up with the disco-dancing diablo that runs the dance floor in his head. #gabecore is extremely frenetic, cycling through themes and sonic motifs from the '70s through the '90s much in the way that contemporary hyper-pop artists do, with a slight analog twist. A lot of the texturing of these songs appear to be the by-product of layering old film reels with found sounds, promulgating a chaos that is comforting in its peculiar familiarity and infectiousness. At times it feels like the grandfather 100 Gecs never had, and at others, the danceable descendent of Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. These comparisons may be misleading though as #gabecore doesn't seem to have any direct musical linage that I can trace. Whatever tree Gabriel fell from, he rolled well into the next county before taking root. It doesn't get much more original than this.
