Ian Brennan is a music producer, writer, and educator from the Bay Area. Beginning in the late 2000s, he has produced a series of acclaimed albums recorded in situ all over the world, often from overlooked music communities and remote areas. He has recorded musicians in Tanzania, Botswana, Bhutan, Comoros, and Suriname, among many other locations. His approach is direct and unadorned, and the albums are created live, without overdubs, bringing new audiences to exceptional music from Malawi Mouse Boys, Rwanda's The Good Ones, Ustad Saami, and countless more. The Recording Academy recognized his work on the Tuareg blues-rock band Tinariwen's album Tassili, earning him a Grammy Award for 2011's Best World Music Album, and also earned a nomination for the Zomba Prison Project recorded in Malawi.
Brennan additionally leads workshops and training in non-violent crisis resolution, which is the subject of 2011's Anger Antidotes: How Not to Lose Your S#&!, 2014's Hate-less and the forthcoming title Peace by Peace: 99 Steps Toward Violence Prevention & Conflict Resolution in Everyday Life.
Ian Brennan has written extensively about music and the music industry; How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the Arts (2016), Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth (2019) and Muse-Sick: A Music Manifesto in Fifty-Nine Notes (2021). His latest, 2024's Missing Music: Voices From Where the Dirt Roads End details his experiences traveling and recording, offering well-observed stories about the people, songs, and places he encounters, telling the stories behind the albums he's facilitated with genuine openness and clear-eyed understanding of global movement and politics.
Missing Music: Voices From Where the Dirt Roads End is an outstanding collection of dispatches from all over the globe about the people, places, and conditions where you have recorded local music. How did you approach assembling the book?
These travels are usually peak experiences stuffed with striking moments. I try to keep notes, but I am a big believer in the gray matter test for songs and writing– the strongest things tend to stick in the subconscious and not fall away.
Interspersed through Missing Music are photographs from Marilena Umuhoza Delli, depicting the musicians and landscapes of your travels. In her introduction, she shares that she's worked on over forty albums with you since 2009. Could you tell us more about this collaboration?
It is all thanks to Marilena. I probably never would have stepped foot in Africa were it not for her. This is not due to lack of desire but because there are many obstacles to traveling to more remote places like Comoros or Suriname. I had never been west of the Mississippi until I was twenty-four. In 2009, Marilena and I traveled to Rwanda with her mother, who is Rwandan. While we were there, we were fortunate enough to meet the incredible folk trio, The Good Ones, and we've continued from there. First, to Malawi—where Marilena also has historical ties—then to recording Tinariwen in the Sahara, and then we haven't stopped since. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of under-represented regions and languages on the planet. They make up the majority. And sadly, every place—even the rich and powerful nations like the USA—have people that have been invisibilized.
Missing Music makes frequent reference to WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), a UK festival that has platformed the artists that you have recorded. Can you discuss the infrastructure for introducing global music to Western audiences and the opportunity it can provide? What are the compromises artists make as they accept more commercial opportunities?
WOMAD offers opportunities for artists to travel out of their nations for the first time ever. Since 2013, we have helped over thirty musicians get passports for the first time and leave their own countries for the first time. This is all thanks to WOMAD's mission. Yes, some "world music" artists do pander to Western exoticism. However, the artists we work with are not performative and without commercial aspirations. They are simply communicating their experience honestly and without pretense.
You've recorded two projects in prisons: Some Mississippi Sunday Morning recorded in Parchman Farm in Mississippi, and the Zomba Prison Project, recorded in Malawi's Zomba Central Prison. Can you tell us about the logistical challenges of accessing and recording in these spaces?
Any time you have to engage with any bureaucracy, it's daunting. However, in both cases at the prisons, we built up trust over time due to the success of the albums. In fact, the Parchman Prison Prayer's second album was recorded earlier this year without a single guard or even chaplain present. Just me and the inmates.
Your recordings are generally released as CD and digital albums; 30-70 minute long and primarily audio statements. Do you feel wedded to the medium of the album?
Our goal is to present artists as truthfully and unmediated as possible. The hope with recordings is that their voices will live on and potentially gather more attention with the passage of time, which is the exact opposite of most pop music, which is hyped and then quickly fades.
In my opinion, we are living through a golden age of thoughtful reissues of archival recordings pulled from all over the world, from Dust-to-Digital and Habibi Funk to Recollection GRM and Numero Group and, for a particular listener, garners just as much attention as new music. Do you find these reissues are growing an audience open to the contemporary music you're recording? Do you fear that the consistent stream of reissues takes away ears from contemporary, living musicians?
Any music that enriches listeners emotionally is of value. Yes, artists are now competing with the past and present, where over 100,000+ songs are uploaded to streaming services daily. However, that concern about existing releases displacing new voices is related to corporations buying up song catalogs of "classic" artists like Phil Collins and Sting for hundreds of millions of dollars. These are the musicians that clogged or hogged the cultural arteries for decades, and these corporations are heavily invested in that monopolization continuing, which is to the detriment of a more organic, healthy, and evolving cultural landscape.
Huge subject, but could I get your thoughts on whether advances in communication technologies (fast internet, social media, digital downloads, and streaming) have eased music's ability to travel globally?
Like everything, the answer is yes and no. It's all about degrees. But to be clear, the idea that people who live without electricity—which is still over half the people in the world—are scrolling for music is a "first world" fantasy. For most of them, internet connectivity is sporadic and limited. Battery life on phones is everything since getting a full battery charge is difficult to access. The fact about music listening today is that 90% of the streaming activity is going to 1% of the artists. Therefore, even though people can listen to more diversity than ever before, few are. The exact opposite is largely what's happening. The hype around accessibility is a confusion of possibility—what could potentially happen—with probability, that which is actually occurring.
I love this quote from you: "Ultimately, any technology exists only as a means to convey feeling, and has little to no value, otherwise, in-and-of-itself." but I'm going to ask the question anyway: what equipment do you bring out when you are recording in remote locations? How do you approach your role as a producer when recording outside of the studio?
My role is simply to be a respectful listener and lead with love. The best songs are often born out of the moment if the artist feels supported and heard.
Unbeknownst to me until we set up this interview, I attended an incredible free concert that you organized in San Francisco's Dolores Park in 2000; Fugazi, Sleater Kinney, DJ Disk and many others played as a benefit for Food Not Bombs. Could you tell us the story behind this historic concert?
Well, it was all thanks to Fugazi. When Ian MacKaye called me and said yes, everything shifted. Sleater-Kinney flew in from Colorado on their one day off from their tour. And Vic Chesnutt was already booked to play in town that night. The only concern that Fugazi had flying all the way to the West Coast for one show was that no one would show up. I had to stay in the park the night prior to guard the stage and gear, and when a group of young guys showed up around 3:30 a.m. that had driven all the way from Utah for the show, I knew everything was going to be just fine. In the end, the park was blanketed. Not one inch of grass was visible. The police on duty estimated that around 15,000 people were in attendance.
Any writing or recording projects or anything else exciting coming up that you would like to share?
We just released the debut collaboration for Jamaican British poet Raymond Antrobus and Dame Evelyn Glennie (the only deaf person to have ever won a Grammy, which she has done twice while being nominated five other times). The entire recording was 100% live and improvised. And it is incredible. The fact that both Evelyn and Raymond are deaf is essentially incidental, a minor factor among many other larger ones.
The advance single, "Parchman Prison Blues," for the Parchman Prison Prayer's second album just came out. It was the last song recorded on the day of recording. Six of the men huddled together and improvised a wordless expression of their pain and longing. Four of them are serving life sentences, one of whom is sixty-six years old and has been there almost his entire adult life. It is an emotionally staggering and epic work on their part.
Also, my tenth book, Peace by Peace: 99 Steps Toward Violence Prevention & Conflict Resolution in Everyday Life, is being published early next year by PM Press. It is another book focusing on anger management and verbal de-escalation, which I have taught since 1993.
