Biography

Now

Joel Davel is a percussionist, composer and instrument builder based in Oakland, California. His playing sits where a mallet instrument, a stage and a circuit board meet — acoustic marimba and orchestral percussion on one side, and on the other the electronic instruments he has spent three decades helping bring into existence.

With Paul Dresher he forms the Dresher | Davel Invented Instrument Duo, a group whose entire instrumentarium was invented and/or built by them: the fifteen-foot Quadrachord, the ten-foot motorized Hurdy Grande, the Marimba Lumina, the Buchla Lightning. The duo has played Carnegie's Zankel Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Sydney Conservatorium, the Canberra International Music Festival and the Beloselski-Belozerski Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has an unusual habit of inviting the audience onstage afterward to put their hands on the instruments.

In autumn 2026 the duo performs Dresher's score live throughout King Lear at Z Space in San Francisco — a thirty-person staging directed by Michael Socrates Moran, co-produced by Oakland Theater Project and New Performance Traditions.

Ensembles

He plays with Vân-Ánh Võ's Blood Moon Orchestra, an ensemble that sets Vietnamese traditional instruments against hip-hop, jazz and electronics, drawing its players from immigrant musical traditions across the Bay Area. With them he has played Stanford Live, Princeton, Carnegie Hall's Musical Explorers and the HOZO Festival in Vietnam.

Davel first appeared with the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band in 1994, and over many years with it has premiered work by Terry Riley, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, David Lang, John Luther Adams, Roger Reynolds, Martin Bresnick, Ingram Marshall, Sebastian Currier and Steven Mackey. With Dresher he also forms half of the Paul Dresher Double Duo, alongside violinist Karen Bentley and pianist Lisa Moore. He has recorded with Amy X Neuburg, Kaila Flexer, Jack West, William Winant, Guillermo Galindo and David Tanenbaum.

Dance and theater

As composer and music director for dNaga Dance Company, Davel has worked with choreographer Claudine Naganuma for many years, scoring Unbound, Reveal, Shaking and Shocking, Freedom House, Lovely Gibberish and Tastes Like Bitterness, Moves Like Love. Their first collaboration, Fences, travelled to Japan, Hawaii, New York and San Francisco. He has also performed with Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Nancy Karp + Dancers and ODC/San Francisco, and in 2025 was music director and live musician for Charya Burt Cambodian Dance's The Rebirth of Apsara, performed from Chicago to Phnom Penh.

Theater is closer to the center of his practice than it is for most percussionists. He was onstage and in costume for a month of outdoor performances of All's Well That Ends Well at California Shakespeare Theater, on a score he co-composed with Gina Leishman; he appeared as actor-percussionist in South Coast Repertory's The Tempest and Peter and the Starcatcher, the former played on instruments built for the Tom Waits score. In opera he premiered Max Duykers' Apricots of Andujar and Both Eyes Open with tenor John Duykers.

Building instruments

Davel worked alongside electronic music pioneer Don Buchla for more than twenty years, a span that covers the Thunder, the Lightning, the Marimba Lumina, the Piano Bar and the 200e series. From 1995 he handled all circuit board layout for Buchla designs — the Marimba Lumina, the Piano Bar, Lightning III and the entire 200e series. He remains lead designer at Buchla USA, responsible for the 208C, the 218e v3, the AuxCard, the iProgramCard and Program Manager, and for every Music Easel project since 2013.

The Marimba Lumina — Don Buchla's electronic mallet instrument, developed with Davel and Mark Goldstein, Davel on circuit board design, beta testing and sound design — became his signature instrument. When commercial production ended, Davel founded Absolute Deviation in 2008 to keep building and supporting it. He still assembles them himself.

The instruments and the playing are not separate careers. Each one is built to find a way of interacting with sound that did not exist before, and once it does exist, someone else can use it too.

Beginnings

The theatrical instinct arrived early. Davel spent seven seasons as instrumental music director and actor-percussionist with Milwaukee's Cream City Semi-Circus, the free summer production of the Friends Mime Theatre, which used Vaudeville and commedia dell'arte to take on social questions in the park. His aesthetic sharpened further with the Neoteric Ensemble, a multimedia group that reinterpreted classical repertoire and improvised into specific sites across northern Illinois and Chicago.

He studied classical percussion at Northern Illinois University and electronic music composition at Mills College, with Rich Holly, Robert Chappell, Cliff Alexis, Ruben P. Alvarez, Tele Lesbines and William Winant.

Teaching

Davel demonstrates classical percussion at the Crowden School's summer camps in Berkeley, and formerly led the percussion program for East Oakland youth through the Allen Temple Baptist Music Program's after-school offerings. He takes private students by request.

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