ANDREW EMIL
CHANGE REQUEST | BROADWAY & WILSON | AFTER MONDAY | UPTOWN TONES | SUNDAY SCOUNDRELS | CROWN HEIGHTS ROYAL | DICHOTOMY
The Longtime Chicago House Music DJ and Producer, Neal Andrew Emil Gustafson, has been a respected fixture and familiar face in the vibrant Chicago and global music scene for over two decades. Part of Chicago’s 3rd wave of house music artists, his musical background begins with being a concert-trained percussionist since age 11. Originally from KCMO, he earned a chair in the Kansas City Symphony before moving to Chicago in the late nineties to attend Columbia College Chicago.
While studying acoustical engineering and music composition with Gustavo Leone, Ilya Levinson, and Andy Hill, Emil began his recording career as an assistant engineer to Vince Lawrence at Chicago Trax Studios. It was during this time that he embarked on a prolific production discography—racking up over 200+ production credits—diligently producing projects for some of house music’s most prominent labels, including remixes for diverse artists such as Common, Kanye West, Little Louie Vega, Jamie Principle, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Iz & Diz, Fast Eddie, Shalamar, Roland Clark, David Morales, Colette, Amp Fiddler, JT Donaldson, and Gene Farris, to name a few.
In 2012, taking a step back from strictly releasing dancefloor-oriented singles—combining up-tempo, mid-tempo, downtempo, and cinematic ambient musical offerings into a new project—Emil debuted the Change Request project and production moniker. After the release of this project’s first EP, the Change Theory on four play music, came the project’s debut single on Seasons Recordings with “After All”, then another single featuring house music icon, Chez Damier, “I Wanna Go Back”—which included a remarkable rework from Glenn Underground—on Glenview Records.
Still continuing to work as a keyboard session player, music arranger, and orchestrator—on projects ranging from concert works to film and TV—Andrew began to write a large number of experimental tracks, compositional etudes, and abstract productions which he archived for yet unknown future releases. Eventually, he created a home for these extracurricular pieces by birthing an electronic-orchestral imprint— in partnership with celebrated media composer, Nathaniel Smith—AstraVox Music.
This effort saw Emil exploring what he refers to as “incidental dramatic music” with a string of releases that have come to define this unique type of tone poem. Beginning with the Light Years EP, then crafting more atmospheric sound designs with the Long Distance EP, as well as exploring longer format sonic spaces with the Kinetic Propulsion EP, his ideas on abstract musical presentation and sonic painting became much more poignant and vivid.
A culmination of this ongoing explorative artistic development led to the next logical step in this creative process: the creation of four conceptual long-plays for the Change Request project, formatted in this style of musical storytelling. The first being RiteOnRed for Dufflebag Recordings, the second album coming out in four parts (by the seasons), with Neural Nocturnes—Autumn, Summer, Winter, and Spring Vibes on Campo Alegre Productions—Then, the Theoretical Certainty LP on the Minneapolis record label, Abstrakt Xpressions, and the final one, All We Have Is Time, dropping in early 2021 on JT Donaldson’s New Math Records.
In addition to his career in music production, Emil’s sound design and content editorial work have seen him become the Marketing Partners Manager for the benchmark international effects processing pioneers, Waves Audio, as well as the former Plug-in Marketing Strategist at GRAMMY® Award-winning audio effects firm, Eventide Audio.
As a music tech journalist, copywriter, and content editor, he is well known for his celebrated editorial with articles regularly making best-of lists (Best Of Attack 2019), such as The Genesis of Synthesis: Ten Reasons Why The Juno Is The Greatest Synthesizer Of All Time.