Enghel

Enghel Gabriel was born in Caracas, on August 22, 1983, son of Peter Rafael Mata and Carmen Rosalia Rodriguez, his first musical mentor. Since a young boy, his dream was to play baseball professionally, pushed by his father. Nevertheless, he used to go, somewhat frequently, to singing, piano, cuatro (a Venezuelan instrument) and music theory lessons, with his mother, even though at first he was not pleased with them.

As he was growing older, he started to like music better, and when he was 11 years old, he started to write songs. Back then, he was going to a couple of chorals, along with his mother, and played piano and cuatro. In 1996, he started to take guitar lessons, instrument that he hadn’t thought of before due to the fact that he is left-handed (he was already playing cuatro with the string backwards), and, as a matter of fact, in his first lesson all he learned was to change and tune up the strings for his left hand.

When he was a teenager, he was interested in having a rock band, and along with three neighbors, founded “Rhapsody Blue”, quartet dedicated to versions, that lasted over a year, due to the fact that his real intention was to play his own songs. In the second semester of 1999, he started rehearsing with his first project of original music: “Enghel’s”, a group of rock fusion with latin rhythms, which lasted six years, and recorded an album (“Heterogeneo”, 2003), that was never launched into the market. During his work with “Enghel’s”, he learned to play other string instrument and percussion instruments, such as tres cubano, drum kit, congas and bongo, while he was developing his way to write songs.

In 2005, Enghel Gabriel founded “SITCOM”, a blues and rock and roll band, that focused its music and lyrics in comedy and social satire, and with which recorded the album “La Abadia del Pecado” in 2007, launched as an independent artist in 2008 and that sold in Venezuela 2.000 copies. “La Abadia del Pecado”, that supposed Enghel Gabriel’s debut as musical producer and arranger, was a conceptual work done with participation of several Venezuelan personalities of radio and TV (Laureano Marquez, Emilio Lovera, Ivan Loscher, Anabelle Blum, Alba Cecilia Mujica, Enrique Hoffman, Edgar Garcia, Jose Manuel Vieira, Vladimir Quintero, Santiago Duarte and Jesus Conde, among others). All them shared their voices with the four members of the band, between one song and another. The album was well received in the Venezuelan rock world and allowed “Sitcom” to present several concerts in several well known theaters and clubs, basically in Caracas. The first single of the album, “Ambas”, one of the eleven songs written by Enghel Gabriel for the album “La Abadia del Pecado”, was frequently played in specialized radio stations in the country, and got among the first 20 songs in the charts of “Pop n’ Rock” of the “Record Report”, as well as the video, in HD (high definition) was aired on several TV stations and on the Internet.

After “SITCOM” was dissolved in 2009, Enghel Gabriel started working on his first solo album, which is in preproduction right now, in his own studio, “La Abadia del Pecado Studio”.