Biography
Raz Mesinai's productions have continuously surprised and inspired thousands of artists from around the world of various fields and disciplines, including experimental and contemporary music, dub, dub step, experimental hip hop, free jazz, noise, drone music, electronic music and Dancehall.
Raz Mesinai's project Badawi (1996-2011) helped define a style of music for film and media about horror and crisis in the Middle East, and his duo project with John Ward, Sub Dub, was a catalyst for the so called "illbient scene" in the 90's in NYC.
After Raz's album from 1999, Badawi: The Heretic Of Ether (Asphodel) was used as the template for the score to the blockbuster film, Black Hawk Down by Ridley Scott, Raz pioneered and coined the term "Score Design", the act of conceptualizing and producing temp and underscore for films with particularly demanding needs, eventually leading him to work on major motion pictures, including Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain", "Black Swan" and "The Wrestler" and more recently, Yaron Zilberman's "A Late Quartet".
In 2004, Raz was awarded the prestigious Sundance Composers Lab Fellowship, where he worked on scores for Sundance Directors, with one on one guidance from composers John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Thomas Newman, Ed Shearmur and Jeff Beal, leading him to compose original scores for several documentaries and feature films.
Raz has received commissions from The Lincoln Center Festival, Carnegie Hall, Kronos Quartet, Ethel, The Kitchen and many other prestigious institutions and ensembles, and has, officially, remixed such artists as Burning Spear (Sub Dub), Shackleton (Badawi) and Arto Lindsay (Sub Dub) among others.
Over the past 15 years, Raz has taught master classes in music production, sound design and film scoring at UCSD, The New School, Dub Spot and NYU and now works exclusively for the UPA.
Raz is CEO of the sound design company Myth & Sound, Co owner of Trans-media production company Dub Fiction and co runs the record labels Silo Rumor w/ Jonathan Uliel Saldana and The Index w/ Dave Q.
