Daniel Masson is closely a maverick artist, following his own sense of style in electronic and world-fusion music scene. Daniel Masson is a music composer, studio producer and guitarist. He lived through the age of popular electronic music and the rise of digital instruments. During his endless trips including Kenya, Cuba, Ibiza, Thailand, Pacific Islands, Syria and Egypt, he has encountered many artists from all corners of the world and developed the ability to wave different music styles and feelings from different cultures together in a mesmerizing symbiosis.
Best known for his musical contribution to the famous compilations of Buddha Bar, Daniel Masson has made a career of crossing musical and technological boundaries. He has experimented with, and excelled in many different musical styles, making a name for himself in world-Chillout music. He has spent decades fostering the development of unusual styles of music before putting his own name on a record album.
Masson’s music career began at an unusually early age. This is not surprising since he had his first guitar when he was eleven. With no formal musical training, he is largely self-taught. At the age of fourteen, he founded a progressive rock Band where he was the composer and the guitarist. His subsequent solo career has been influenced by a variety of musical styles and genres ranged from jazz-fusion, avant-garde rock, electric and acoustic rock including bandleaders who had a profound influence on future musicians like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Wes Montgomery, Stanley Clarke and Joe Pass, to the pioneers in the early days of electronic music such as Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze and Ryūichi Sakamoto.
Arrived in Paris in 1976, he became a guitar teacher, offering lessons during the day and performing Jazz music in clubs during the night. When the first synthesizers had arrived, Masson is one the earliest musicians to be associated with Computer-assisted composition. In 1987, He founded with his brother Christophe the Jungle Boys, a new wave music genre and a vinyl was released by EMI France Studios. This short experience has led him to give concerts in numerous French theatres. For many years, he has performed as studio producer and session guitarist for various French artists such as Julio Iglesias.
When further technological progress has been made in music, Daniel Masson left the Band and embarked on music programming and studio production since the 90. His versatility is almost nearly without peer. He has scored great number of high profile TV shows and commercials such as for France Telecom, Darphin, Roger & Gallet, Choppard Watches and Swissair Airlines. His special talents led composer Goran Bregovic to hire him to program and produce music of the famous movie “Queen Margot”. The movie has won a César for best music written for a film in 1995. He also scored the BBC Documentary "Living the Dream". Over the years, Daniel has provided hundreds of videos games soundtracks for Disney, Paramount and Ubisoft to name but a few. This rewarding experience has brought him to explore other horizons of musicality while his work continues to be highly requested.
Masson fell quickly in love with world-fusion music when he first met in 1999, in Paris, Bari Siddiqui, a classical flautist, who created his own genre of folk fusion of North Indian Classical sounds with Baul traditional music. Since then, Masson has been travelling all over the planet in searching for new sounds whereby he could develop his musical creativity in a spiritual surrounding. These adventures have fed Daniel’s inspiration to create his unique musical creativity: each of his albums tells a story of a journey and encountering with people. He founded his own label Jungle Line Records.
Masson’s first “music Journey” was Electromana in Bangladesh. He spent 3 years composing, mixing and programming world elements and vocals of various artists from Bangladesh and Polynesia including Bari Saddiqui, Krishna, Firuz Khan. In 2002, he released his first album “Jet Lag”, a brand new sound of electro-world music. As a second journey, Masson has composed and produced 9 albums, the “Pacific Islands Collection” at Oceania Records. Each album is a subject of a Pacific Island.
Later, with the support of the French Foreign Ministry, he came back to Bangladesh to record and film the cream of Bangladesh’s Baul music tradition. There, he met other top artists including Bibi Russell, an international fashion designer and United Nations artist for peace, Farida Parveen and Norul Haque. Two years later, he released the CD/DVD “Baul Dimension” in which he created a unique atmospheric ambiance where digital sounds are perfectly fused with human voices. He enriched the project by integrating elements recorded and filmed in Kenya, Cuba, Ibiza, Thailand and the Pacific Islands.
During his long trips, Masson has spent more than 10 years collecting ethnic sounds and human voices to use them in his home studio. His new Album “adventures” is a collection of old songs remixed including the project “fashion for development” featuring Bibi Russell, bari Saddiqui among other artists.
Never one to be satisfied with the status quo, Daniel continues to push the limits of his artistry, fusing genres, styles, and technologies to create new and exciting directions in musical expression. With the EP “Bingo “released in 2006 and the second “Trempolino” in 2008, Masson wishes to create a new composition style wherewith he blends ethnic sounds into an instrumental uplifting atmosphere of minimalist electronic music.
In 2007, he went to Syria and Egypt to record the music of “Buddha Bar Travel Impressions”. He composed and produced the music, while Fred Spillmann has produced the video. The CD\DVD album has been released in 2008 at George V Records.
Today, Daniel Masson is an internationally acclaimed artist who dreams of the universal connection between all peoples and cultures. His music is described as a mixture of vibration and harmony.
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