BY JACK
KENNEDY
I had been writing and producing music in Los Angeles long enough to question the state of my existence when I got an email asking me to come to Iraq and help record an album to be called Mosul Live. My heart leapt with joy. Finally, a break from gluten-free lunches and vegan ice cream. Finally, a break from young songwriters and various A&R guys not calling me back. Finally, something bigger than the music business. I may as well have been going to Mars. I joyously told my girlfriend about the job offer. She was alarmed by my excitement and we split up shortly thereafter. Some people got visibly uncomfortable when I talked excitedly about going to Iraq to record musicians living under the Islamic State. Some changed the subject to Game of Thrones. I have never seen Game of Thrones. Back in 2013, a poet, translator, and friend named David Shook brought me to Haiti to help with some relief work. I brought my Digidesign Mbox 2 and recorded a great Haitian singer in Port Au Prince. David had now moved to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he was an artist in residence at The American University of Iraq Sulaimani (AUIS). AUIS, under the leadership of author and translator Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse, was beginning a project to document people living in Mosul during the occupation by the Islamic State (2014 to 2017). They had been recording the spoken word stories of civilians in Mosul and wanted to make an album, Mosul Live, by affected musicians. During the occupation music was outlawed, taken off the radio, and forbidden to be performed in public. In the months leading up to the project I assembled a recording system. I needed a multitrack recorder that was battery powered and could last all day. Some areas would not have electricity, and the areas that did have power experienced outages throughout the day. (Case in point: as my plane was landing in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, I watched a large section of the city's lights go out.) The Sound Devices MixPre-10 was my best option. It would run for 20 hours at a time on two battery packs, and it had eight mic inputs with Kashmir preamps that record to a hard disk/thumb drive. I combined that with a handful of microphones from SE Electronics, and the whole setup fit nicely into an over-the-shoulder Stingray bag made by K-Tek.
