beyond music is the first exhibiton of musician and music producer Gordon Raphael, who produced amongst others The Strokes and Skin. After a successful presentation in Berlin in june 2009, now the exhibition will be shown in Lodz in the context of the Soundedit’09 – Festival of Music Producers and Sound Designers.
Gordon Raphael played in a lots of bands, and produced innumerable others. Since his childhood, he always did little paintings and drawing on paper. Later he started to document the musicscene of his surroundings with the foto- and videocamera. The creative influences of his producing comes from a very wide scope. He was inspired by Flemish painters (H.Bosch and Brueghel) and surrealists like Salvador Dali, as well as from the style of comics and films by Stanley Kubrik and Charlie Chaplin. The result of this mixture of sources of inspiration are paintings, in which appear trance and dream images as well as Christian motives contrasted with neoncolors and glitter. Over years he produced hours of unshown videomaterial and thousands of fotos. From this collection of multifaceted works, will now be presented a selection of paintings and drawings, a slideshow of fotos and several videos.
Born in Bronx (New York) in the late 1950′s, as the son of a jazz musican and scientist, Gordon Raphael encountered music and art very early in his life. At the age of six he won an art contest in painting. At thirteen, after years of piano lessons, he played electric organ in his first rock band. After high school he was planning to go to university and become a filmmaker, but then the most popular band in Seattle at this time The Sorceror’s Apprentice asked him to join, so he decided go for the path of music. At the end of the eighties he went to New York with hopes of becoming a star in the musicscene with his “crazy westcoast sound”, but he failed. Whereupon he returned to Seattle in the early 1990′s, which had become the melting-pot of the American musicscene. Some years later he went agian to New York and worked as a producer. He met The Strokes and recorded their album „Is This It“. Because of this success, he went to London. He started his own music label Shoplifter Records and produced the second album of The Strokes. On request of the singer Skin, he produced with her the Album »Fake Chemical State«. In the year 2004, Moses Schneider invited him to Berlin, to work on the »Smack Smash« album of the Beatsteaks, and so he decided to live here.
