Next Up in Raz Mesinai's Badawi Project: the Driving, Cinematic Soldier of Midian

"It started with me playing with toys," says Raz Mesinai. We’re in his mother’s Manhattan apartment, surrounded by artwork and objects from what seem to be most of the world’s major religious traditions: Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist. Mesinai’s recording studio is below us, down a short flight of spiral stairs. "My mother would take me into places like the Sinai desert and I’d have my toys, like Transformers dolls. That was what the concept was–the desert was involved but there was also a cyborg aspect to it… It’s mainly about a place where people aren’t allowed to leave their bodies, but some people decide that they really need to. Then there’s other people that come and get them back." He pauses. "There’s starting to be a lot of movies like that now, but this was very different from any of those films."

Mesinai is talking about his best-known project, Badawi, which since 1996 has spanned four albums combining dub, other danceable rhythms and Middle Eastern sounds to crowd-pleasing effect. Badawi began as the soundtrack to a comic book Mesinai says he was too shy to show to anyone. While the first two Badawi records, Bedouin Sound Clash and Jerusalem Under Fire, used recognizable reggae basslines and featured sultry, edgy-yet-mellow vocals by Honeychild, the latest, Soldier of Midian (ROIR), is driving, frenzied, cinematic and full of Middle Eastern strings and percussion.

The quote at the beginning of this article comes from Mesinai’s unsigned note on the new record’s sleeve. Although it reads like a parable out of the Koran or the Old Testament, it’s straight from his own imagination, the imagination of a man steeped in mysticism from an early age who counts both the late singer and rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and dervish Sheik Murshid Hassan among his spiritual and musical teachers.

I put it to Mesinai that this story, of someone being called upon to fight for God and refusing, was particularly timely. "Well, you have to remember these things existed and were happening. They weren’t not happening before [Sept. 11]," he responds. He explains that "stories are how I start records. Some stories I’m thinking, some stories are just happening around us as we’re living. They may be true, but they’re still stories. Eventually they will become a story or a myth, and something that will be distorted. Each record gets a little closer to that idea of storytelling through music."

Mesinai’s first album for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Before the Law, came out in September and as a consequence was "kind of lost," he says with a shrug. It’s a tribute to and sonic reimagining of the works of Franz Kafka, and from the opening–ominous, echoey knocking on what sounds like a metal door–to the last few seconds, when a rising, jagged violin line is abruptly cut off–it’s a tour de force. Full of irregular silences, insect-like noises, muted voices and stark, infernal percussion, it’s possible to imagine the record appealing to someone who’s never read a word of Kafka. But what’s most impressive is how closely the music does evoke Kafka’s unique written universe. (It could also be a lost soundtrack to the best parts of Orson Welles’ version of The Trial.)

"I wanted it to sound like no one’s listening to each other," Mesinai says. "In The Trial, no one’s paying attention to what [Joseph K.] is saying to them. He’s saying, ‘Why am I under arrest?’ but they’re kind of dilly-dallying around him."

Mesinai recorded the seven other musicians on the record, improvising to sound structures he laid down on drum or piano. Then he edited out his own parts and cut up and reassembled those of the others. "I wanted to make it a little unsettling… Just the idea of when you make a track and you sample from records–none of the people who made those records were listening to each other, but if you just let them play, eventually they collide and they actually work together."

As opposed to Badawi, which is more of a personal story, with Before the Law there’s a universal reference point, at least for those who’ve read Kafka. I asked Mesinai if this might restrict the imagery people conjure up when listening to the music, but he wasn’t too concerned. "It’s loose, I’m seeing something and then I name things accordingly. It’s not, like, a guy is hitting a guy in the head with a baseball bat, but there is some situation going on where that might occur, where someone might be hit with a baseball bat." He laughs. "It’s music, it’s not words… Stories to me sound like music, or not even music but sounds."

•Born in Israel, Mesinai moved to New York when he was three and considers the city his home base, although he went back and forth between the two for many years. He began playing piano at age six and took up percussion at seven or eight (he’s never had formal instruction on any instrument). His first interest in electronics and turntables came in the heyday of "break-dance music," but he stopped making music altogether for a time while concentrating on drawing comic books. Eventually he started making primitive tracks again, without access to a real studio. Mesinai’s first true recording projects came in the early 90s as half of the duo Sub Dub, which put out two full-lengths and two EPs. (Those EPs, as well as one that was never released, are currently available from local label theAgriculture.)

Mesinai’s partner in Sub Dub was John Ward. "We met in a record store, Vinylmania. I would go there with cassettes of my music and give them to people. I gave one to John, and he called me up and came over. I was 17 or 18… Anyway, I went to his studio and he showed me how to use a studio. Mixing, recording, doing other things I didn’t pay so much attention to, like e.q.…" He laughs again. "I’m just like a dub freak, you know. And I still use dub, as in the skill of engineering and the art form of dubbing a mix, but it occurred to me that I didn’t need to use reggae to do dub, though its roots are in reggae. Everything I do is going to be dub in a way. Before the Law was dubbed. It may not sound that way, but it actually comes from the experience of learning how that’s done."

What in retrospect looks like a turning point in Mesinai’s music, toward storytelling and away from just making tracks, came when he was commissioned to do the soundtrack to Hellraiser VI. Someone connected with the movie had heard and liked the third Badawi album, The Heretic of Ether, finding it "spooky or scary or something like that," so Mesinai set to work, with mixed results. "It came down to the film and me and we were clashing," he says. In the end, only five minutes of his score were used, but "I got paid the same, so that was good." He was left with a lot of intentionally scary music and turned that into The Unspeakable (BSI), an over-the-top soundtrack to a horror film that doesn’t exist, though the disturbing dolls on the CD sleeve seem like an homage of sorts to Chucky. Filled with noise and screams, sometimes slightly cheesy, often genuinely disquieting, The Unspeakable reflects Mesinai’s love of classic horror soundtracks like The Exorcist as well as The Shining, where the filmmakers used existing classical compositions with preternaturally creepy results. At the same time, The Unspeakable would probably overwhelm any actual film–certainly any film with dialogue.

Nowadays Mesinai is working–slowly–on his second album for Tzadik, which will feature Eyvind Kang and Mark Feldman, the latter of whom also played on Before the Law. He’s done turntable projects with DJ Olive and Toshio Kajiwara, as part of the electronic music collective Rotor and he’s working on a piece for the performance space Roulette that would use actors and have a libretto.

"Sound effects, news broadcasts, commercials. The libretto keeps changing. It was a bit apocalyptic, which was my tendency, but that seems like a bad idea." Maybe the opera–a dub opera?–will realize all of Mesinai’s preoccupations–mysticism, comics, horror, sci-fi and the versatility and humor of a man who can play the theme to Masterpiece Theater by thwacking the inside of his cheeks.