My name is Daniel Gardner. My main project is called Frivolous. I participated in (and emerged from) the Canadian underground Electronic Music scene under heavy influence from German Minimal House (Frankfurt circa late-2000's) and the French and Québécois Mikrohouse movements. Under the name Frivolous I compose original Electronic music which has resulted in a substantial body of work published by various independent labels around the world. Although you will hear the 'Zeitgeist' of various genres and periods of music in my work I try not to be bound to any Genre. I  unapologetically borrow influences from cultures and styles throughout history and weave them into a fluidly evolving work.

In addition to the Frivolous work I've produced music on a commission-basis for podcasts and Radio-stations including Deutschland-Radio, TwenFM and have worked on a freelance basis at the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) in live-sound. Performing this work live at selected special locations; Frivolous (Live) has been featured at such renowned Festivals as Montreux Jazz Festival, MUTEK, Transmediale/CTM and Amsterdam Dance Event. I currently have a studio in Berlin where I continue to record original music, collaborate with other artists and make remixes while also doing live sound capture for independent films and sound-mixing (front of house) at the Konzertreihe am Café Tasso in Berlin-Friedrichshain.

Sound Engineering: my excursion into Sound-Engineering has mostly been unguided and unconventional. Perhaps this is the reason for the unique sound of Frivolous over the years (see sections: New Releases & Discography for links to newer and older work). My musical journey started with Classical music studies at a young age. I was enrolled at Royal Conservatory of Music where I begrudgingly finished my Grade-8: including Music-Theory and History. After many years of working and touring I finally completed an MA in 2020 in Creative Electronic Music Production at Catalyst Institute in Berlin. This may sound like a strange order, but it offered me the opportunity to do something possitive during the Pandemic and gave me the chance to return to Europe after almost 10 years of living back in Canada on an small island in the Pacific Northwest. I also came to this MA program at Catalyst Institute with many ideological demons in my closet - topics which I was growing ever-more uncomfortable with in the landscape of modern music production: especially as it played-out between 2008-2018. The Masters program taught me how to conduct a Practice-based research approach to dealing with these concerns which did certainly helped me to address the issue academically. This gave me the intellectual tools to assert for my growing discomfort regarding the music of this time (Mainly that the tools being used to achieve perceptual LOUDNESS in recorded music was also killing music's inherent ability to model or reproduce "reality-based spatial sound"). In the program I conducted a study (more artistic than scientific) to determine if the music of this time (which was becoming known to many technicians as "the loudness war period") was not only evolving in an aesthetic way, but doing so in direct conversation with the "reality" of acoustic spatial sound design. Playing with these ideas of reality or, at least, referencing the human-being's experience in sound-design had (up to this point) been ubiquitous in sound recordings up until around 2008 in almost every genre including Electronic Music. After which time it seemed engineers were placing less emphasis (consciously or unconsciously) on "reality-based" spatial acoustic modeling techniques in favor of fragmented or "hyper-reality" spatial dimensions. This led to the question: was the competition for loudness impeding music's ability to convey the human-experience or, perhaps in parallel, does a new sonic "hyper-reality" allow listeners a new possibility: to escape (rather than be reminded of) the reality of resentful human decline (OH SHIT! this just got DARK but who said Academia isn't dark?!? :-D)

Let's not focus on the darkness of this prospect! In my mind Music is meant to unite, illuminate and transcend - thus proving that I certainly have a bias towards one of the two options. Can you tell which one? (reality or hyper-reality based sound design?) I guess my listeners can easily determine the answer for themselves.

Almost (nearly) complete discography @ Discogs.com