Gordon Raphael

Hello world!

I’m a musician and record producer born in New York, best known for The Strokes Is This It and Room On Fire, as well as Regina Spektor’s astonishing debut Soviet Kitsch. I play keyboards,guitar, bass and sing.

After spending my rebellious teenage years in Seattle playing rock- n-roll keyboards in bands, I taught myself how to use tape recorders and analog synthesizers as a method of writing my own original outer-space songs. These compositions featured heavy use of ring modulator, Arp Odyssey synthesizer, Echoplex, phase shifters, mad distortion and poetry. My own bands were: Mental Mannequin, Colour Twigs, Sky Cries Mary and Absinthee. (Sky Cries Mary was a beloved Seattle band during the grunge era)

In 1998 I made an honorable pilgrimage back to New York where I planned to dazzle the Big Apple with my West Coast musical brilliance. In fact, performing songs in nightclubs was rather slow going, but my Transporterraum NYC studio earned a reputation for great recordings done at a cheap price. NYC musician Jimmy Goodman and cutting edge Berlin producer Moses Schneider (Van Der Meer, Beatsteaks, Tocotronic) joined forces with me, developing that studio into a giant-killer!

I moved to London, and then to Berlin after the success of Is This It. By that time I’d recorded over 100 bands, including The Strokes, Regina Spektor, Skin, The Libertines, Ian Astbury, Ian Brown, Hinds, Satellites and Kill Kenada. As a producer, songwriter and music fan I prefer music that is unique and powerful, always choosing to work with bands and artists that have the magic spark of creativity. So far I’ve produced and mixed twenty of my own albums, the latest of which, “Floodlight of the Moon” was recorded in Buenos Aires Argentina.

I moved back to England in 2019, and am now excited to announce that my first book,

THE WORLD IS GOING TO LOVE THIS (Up From the Basement With THE STROKES)

is going to be published by WORDVILLE on July 2nd (my birthday) 2022!

websight: https://www.gordotronic.com/

Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gordotronic

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gordonraphael/