Ludwig Van Beethoven
Johann Sebastian Bach
Antonio Vivaldi
Jean Michel Jarre
Vangelis
Enigma
Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails
Yanni
Rush
Dream Theater
Ravi Shankar
Fairuz
Abdel Halim Hafez
Joseph Gergis is a musician in the Dayton, Ohio area. His primary focus is the electronic genre, and his first CD release, The Darker Light, illustrates the fusion of his classical training with his passion for analog synthesis.
Joseph was born in New Jersey to parents who saw great value in music. While growing up in New York, his parents exposed him to various types of music: from rock, pop, classical, and religious, to more esoteric music to Western ears, such as Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese. It was a performance of Vangelis’ Pulstar in the 1980 science series Cosmos that first introduced him to electronic music.
This in turn led him to discover synthesizers, and from there, it was love (and gear lust). More investigation and insight by his music teacher led him to discover Jean-Michel Jarre, whom Joseph now claims as a major influence on his music. From there, Joseph’s passion for music expressed itself through his school training: choir and then violin. Joseph’s studies in the violin enabled him to participate in several special orchestras, including SCMEA and the Long Island String Festival. His true love, however, was always the electronic genre.
A change in colleges forced him to drop an electronic music minor and pursue his musical studies on his own. He taught himself to play keyboards during this time in his life. In 1995, on the advice of a friend, he began composing music and performed a set at his college in Stony Brook, NY in April of that year. He continued writing music for the next several years, and transitioned to software based synthesizers only in late 2006. It was not until 2008 that the concept of putting out an album commercially seemed feasible.
In January, Joseph made the decision to partake in the RPM 2008 Challenge, which is summed up as one simple sentence: “Write an album of 10 songs or 35 minutes, in the 29 days of February.” He pulled together all of his musical knowledge to produce The Darker Light. With the challenge successfully completed, he faced the next challenge: what to do with it? Joseph took the plunge and published the music himself digitally through Tunecore on iTunes, Amazon, and others.
Joseph plans to continue exploring the fusion of the analog and the digital, the classical and the modern, and the Eastern and the Western in his future musical work. He is also considering moving into other genres, including both traditional rock and film scoring. He currently uses Propellerhead’s Reason, Korg Legacy DLC, Oddity, and Apple's GarageBand as his software synthesizer setup.
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