About Mitchell On Fire
I have always been a serious musician. Though raised in the Kentucky bluegrass community, I formally studied formal classical guitar as a teen. As an art student, I joined a series of electronic noise bands before studying sitar for 3 months in Varanasi, India.

Yet music production was never a serious pursuit until I moved to Cairo, Egypt in 2008, where I spent the next two years producing hip hop with Sudanese gangs and other local artists. We would stay up all night, listening to Erykah Badu, smoking, and recording vocals with a microphone wedged between mattresses. The gang members would sell CDs on the corner - pushing their music instead of drugs – and organized local concerts in Zamalek, a small island in the Nile river. Music became a means to change their lives. To better understand American hip hop, we found funding to provide English lessons. With education, new programs were developed for sports teams and family health care. Over two years of making music, their lives changed, as did the neighborhood. Soon, other Sub-Saharan musicians living in Cairo sought me out. Some examples of our work are here and here.

The experience producing hip hop in Egypt set the foundation for future explorations. Between 2011 and 2013, I lived in Kabul, Afghanistan and worked in Mogadishu, Somalia. In Somalia, I collected field recordings of the sounds around me - the white noise of the ocean, the vibrant markets, and the sounds of gunfights. Then, back home in the relative safety of Kabul, we would drink and dance all night to global pop hits in Afghan speakeasies. My large repository of fielding recordings and those late nights of escape are the foundation of my sound. From my exclusive archive, I write music to connect my listeners to the most remote corners of the earth, such as this piece Jazeera - a remote village in coastal Somalia. At other times, exploring the richness of AI within popular songwriting, such as this very gritty, simulated collaboration between Fred Again and Taylor Swift.