Gábor is the son of a diabetic Hungarian puppeteer and a chain-smoking espresso-drinking bookworm. He is also the grandson of a womanising hardware store owner and the great-grandson of one József Rabinovitsj who was jailed for a time for his part in the short-lived Hungarian communist uprising of 1919. Gábor is the grandson of women named Irma Schulczer and Szidonia Lichtenstein. He is the nephew of a Tatar journalist who lived to the age of 104 and the neighbour of someone named Johan.
Gábor grew up amidst the turmoil of the disco era and befriended various teenage drug addicts and would-be Springsteen imitators along the way. His parents spoke almost exclusively Hungarian in the home while the language on the streets was of course ‘North York English’. Despite this fact, Gábor was raised in the ancient language of the Sumerians in which the verb ‘to hit’ is crucial above all else. It is no wonder then that percussion took hold of him at such a tender age.
When Gábor was ten he beat the living daylights out of his first snare drum. (Metaphorically speaking of course. A snare drum doesn’t have any living daylights as such. Actually, you have to beat living daylights into a drum if you want it to live. It’s complicated.)
He is a fan of (in order of being written down): Morton Feldman, Alexander Vvedensky, Steve Gadd, Gertrude Stein, Fela Kuti, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, the Doobie Brothers, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jeanette Winterson, Supertramp, László Krasznahorkai, Katie Mack, Carlo Rovelli, Wiszlawa Szymborska, ee cummings, Seinfeld, Frank Leonard, Olga Tokarczuk, Guillaume Dufay, and the Swedish Chef.
He is not a fan of: Anton Bruckner (the greatest hoax in the history of classical music, seriously), dogs named Pepe, the smell of ginseng, Motörhead (just because of the umlaut), most of Mozart, a day at the beach.
He does not own a golf club.
He has performed to great acclaim in Austria in ghastly swimming trunks and played electronically prepared cacti in a theatre production about mars, space and humankind.
He composes music and texts.
He uses the following pronouns: each/another
gábor tarján, composer/percussionist 