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Chris Joss was born in France. When he was 14, he received an acoustic guitar and taught himself to play. In 1981, he founded his own band at high school.[2][bettersourceneeded]
Career
In 1987, Joss released his first record with his three-member band on EMI. In 1991, he released his third record on CBS with a seven-member band.[2] He moved to London, where he lived throughout the 1990s, until it became too expensive.[3] In 1994 he played with a group called Monk and recorded and produced his first album.[2] In 1995 and 1996, he embarked on recording his inaugural LP, Music From 'The Man With a Suitcase', conceptualized as the soundtrack for an imaginary 1960s TV series. In 1998, the title track was included in a compilation in the UK.[citation needed]
Joss returned to France and secured a deal with Cristal Publishing in La Rochelle, which facilitated an agreement with the French indie label Pulp Flavor.[3] When US record label ESL re-released You've Been Spiked in 2004 with new cover art, the cover described him as a DJ, leading to a string of DJ-related offers. Joss only had the chance to play a few live sets, twice in Amsterdam and twice in his home town in 2007. For these performances he used Ableton Live, a tool designed for music production and live performance.[4] He couldn't continue with these live performances because of his worsening tinnitus at the time.[4] When the album's cover art was adapted for a double LP in 2007 and later re-released on his own label, Joss replaced the word "DJ" with "instrumentalist" to better reflect his role as a composer and a musician.[4]
Personal life
Joss has suffered since childhood from misophonia, a condition that makes one become extremely sensitive to everyday repeated sounds. He titled his 10th album Misophonia to bring attention to the condition.[4] In 2005 he suffered an injury which caused permanent damage to the cartilage and tendons in his elbow, limiting wrist movement to a quarter turn and making extended periods of playing painful.[4] As a result, he no longer performs live.[2]
His 1999 album The Man with a Suitcase was part of a trend in the late 1990s of "imaginary soundtracks", compositions created to accompany films that did not actually exist.[7] In the soundtrack, he attempted to pay homage to works of the 1960s and 1970s such as The Avengers and Mission Impossible, with a mixture of jazz, pop, rock, and funk.[7] His 2008 track "I want Freedom", taken from his fourth album, is part of Apple Inc.'s iPhoto 10 and iPhoto 11 software.[8]
As of 2021, Joss had released twelve solo albums plus a remix album; five of them by ESL Music[9] and six on his own Teraphonic Records.
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