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Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End details Grammy-winning music producer and author Ian Brennan’s ongoing quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations and populations around the world.
In a compact and quick-read format, Missing Music collects the latest narratives from Brennan’s field-recording treks. This edition features a greater emphasis on storytelling and an even greater abundance of photos from his wife, Italian-Rwandan photographer/filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli.
Together, they meet the elderly shamans of the world’s most musical language, Taa, a tongue that sadly is dying, with fewer than 2,500 speakers left. The duo traveled the most remote roads of Botswana to find the formally nomadic people now relegated to small desert towns.
In Azerbaijan, Brennan and Delli ascended to the mountainous Iranian border to record centenarians in scattered villages of the Talysh minority, where the world’s oldest man reportedly reached the age of 168. The result is the only record ever released to feature the voices of singers over one-hundred years of age.
Among other tales, Brennan also updates the saga of the Sheltered Workshop Singers following COVID, including the tragic deterioration of his sister, Jane.
Arising from the more than forty records that Brennan has produced over the past decade from underrepresented nations such as Comoros, Djibouti, Romania, South Sudan, Suriname, and Cambodia, Missing Music serves as the newest suite in the multiverse symphony of the world’s most ignored corners—the places where countries expire and the “forgotten” live.
“Music is one of the best doors into a culture and Ian Brennan has
opened them in more far-off corners than anyone. He writes of the people
he meets and their music with vivid directness and great generosity of
spirit.”
—Joe Boyd, Grammy-nominated producer (Nick Drake, Richard and Linda Thompson, Pink Floyd) and author of White Bicycles
“An
activist and ambassador for the overlooked and underappreciated
musicians of the world. Brennan is an important counterculture figure of
our time. His writing, like his productions, deserves a spotlight.”
—Raymond Antrobus, award-winning poet
“Looking for music in the far corners of the world, Brennan has made recordings and albums that no one else has even thought to capture, let alone made the effort needed to do so. He has brought voices, stories, and feelings to the world’s listeners that likely would never have been known without his selfless efforts.”
—Larry Crane, founder, publisher, and editor of Tape Op, producer for Elliott Smith