Rwanda: Love Songs from the Ashes of a Genocide

Ian Brennan on Field Recording in Rwanda

They were standing in the dark, their eyes downcast and furtive, and holding only one guitar between them. From one hundred feet away, I knew instantly that there was something special about them, a feeling one is lucky to experience even once in a lifetime. By that point, for over two weeks we’d already visited literally every recording studio in the capital [of Rwanda], Kigali, and surrounding areas, and listened to hundreds of artists, all to no avail.

We even attended a Kigali music festival where every performer seemed to be nothing more than a cookie-cutter version of a corresponding Western celebrity—same dress, affect, gestures, intonation, and hyperkinetic, but empty moves—with the only alteration being that the local language was grafted on top. (In the darkness that night, groups of pre-adolescents kept strutting up to us in mass, busting moves, “calling us out” to a dance-off, for which we were clearly out of our league and probably quite wisely declined.)

The meeting with the band, the Good Ones, had been set up through a mutual friend—someone who was quite talented himself, but was adamant that they were far better. The instant the band opened their mouths to sing, it was as if the universe reached down to tap me on the shoulder and say, “What these guys do is precious and rare. Don’t fuck it up.”

It felt like being carried away on a wave, but with no fear of drowning.
Earlier on the trip I experienced a cross-cultural, mini-epiphany when, Akim, who had driven us to all four corners of Rwanda in search of music, angrily ejected from his car stereo the 8-track tape that I had found of 1970s Rwandan singer Kagambage Alexandre. Akim immediately replaced it with the only collection he owned. It was of Mandarin pop, the strain that is played in cheesy Chinese-American restaurants.

Alexandre’s music featured vintage synths and elegantly analog saturation that would make a Brooklyn hipster weak in the knees. But, to our local friend, the recording just sounded like “God” music and the saccharine tripe from Asia was “much cooler,” which he made ultra-clear by way of his endlessly looping it at all hours throughout the multitudinous miles, making our way southwest by following the lines of satellite dishes like sextants.

Since the multitrack was “lost” in transit by the airline, the entire Good Ones’ album had to be recorded on a video camera. Fortunately, the old-school camcorder had two XLR-inputs, allowing for the connection of higher-grade microphones. I was provided little choice but to set up two ribbon condenser-microphones that I’d had for decades, and position each one in the gap between the...