Filmmaker Cyrus Moussavi Finds Stories Where the Music Lives

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The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cyrus Moussavi has carved out a career that is as improbable as it is original. Raised in Iowa in a bicultural Iranian American household, Cyrus grew up spending summers in Iran and the rest of the year steeped in his father’s love of prog rock and his mother’s passion for traditional Iranian music. That early immersion in disparate sound worlds laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with music—not as a performer, but as a listener, connector, and storyteller. After studying economics and philosophy in college, Cyrus gravitated toward filmmaking, not to make conventional movies but to explore how visual storytelling could capture, preserve and transmit music and the lives of those who make it.

As a filmmaker, Cyrus has developed a body of work that’s both deeply collaborative and boldly inventive. His films include “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” a science-fiction documentary co-directed with the visionary artist and musician Lonnie Holley that screened at Sundance and BlackStar, among many other festivals and galleries, and the upcoming “Somebody’s Gone,” a feature-length film about gospel legend Brother Theotis Taylor that he is co-directing with Brother Theotis’ son, Hubert. And as a music archivist and promoter, since 2019 Cyrus has led the influential reissue label Mississippi Records, where he works closely with artists and their families to bring overlooked and under-celebrated music from around the world to new audiences.

In this interview, Cyrus discusses how his early experiences shaped his eclectic sensibility, what it means to ethically archive music across cultures and how he sees his work as both creative practice and cultural preservation. 

Pier Carlo Talenti: One of your passions is bringing to the fore music from all corners of the world that most people might not know anything about. How do you keep your ear to the ground? How do you do your research?

Cyrus Moussavi: That’s a good question. I worked as a journalist for many years and spent a lot of time abroad in different places and was always listening to music and meeting musicians while doing that. 

Pier Carlo: What kind of journalism were you doing?

Cyrus: This is where actually the first part of the career started. I was doing short documentary films for NBC about music. We were doing films about music as it relates to larger social, political and cultural stories. It was this project I was doing called “Raw Music International,” and that’s where all these different disparate elements — the background in economics, the growing up in between a few different places and the love for music and film — came together. 

We would document music by nomads in Mongolia as a larger story about climate change and how that’s affecting culture. We were in Ukraine early in the war. We were in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Instead of asking the hard news questions, we were finding the musicians and asking them what’s happening.

Pier Carlo: Why is music the perfect entree for these larger sociopolitical conversations?

Cyrus: I think it’s a solid entry point because it’s sort of a Trojan horse. You’re not forcing people to talk about politics, you’re not forcing people to say too much that they might otherwise get in trouble for, but you do allow … . Somehow musicians have always been allowed a voice that other people aren’t allowed within every society, so [chuckling] musicians are pretty good at talking about things in a way that gets them by and allows them to get away with it. In Ethiopia, they call it wax and gold, where you speak in one way but it means something else. I think regardless of where you’re from, all musicians have this ability to dance between the dominant culture of where they are and the subcultures in which they exist and do their daily operating.

I think musicians are really fun people to be around. I’m not interested in talking to military people or economists or oil prospectors. I want to be like, “Where’s the music? What are people doing at night? Where’s the most transcendent experience? Take me there.” Through that, you learn a lot. It’s always the underground too that’s more interesting to me. That’s where musicians often take you. 

Wherever I land, I find a bookshop or a record store or find the guy busking and playing music and just start talking. We often find some common ground, and something fun comes of it.

Pier Carlo: How do you build that trust with an artist that you’re going to work with or that you’re going to amplify, especially if there are language and cultural barriers?

Cyrus: Yeah, also a very good question and one that is constantly evolving. I think a lot of my interest in music also came out of working for an economist who first took me to Kenya for some large NGO project. I saw this vast power dynamic between the people who were representing the U.N. and these large NGOs and the people who are supposedly benefiting from their services that felt really uncomfortable and not necessary sometimes. Music was another way to lessen that gap between two people. You’re both musicians. While you recognize that obviously I have a lot of privileges that allow me to even be there in that scenario, I’m not coming as a representative of a large power. I’m coming either as myself, a musician or artist, or as a representative of a small record label or an independent film. Automatically I think that cuts out a lot of the vast gap that occurs between people in these situations. 

Then a lot of it is just this sort of feeling tone is what they call it; it’s just a human interaction that you have with people. When I was younger, I approached these things very intuitively, and as a result they were sometimes messy or unclear. As I’m getting older and have done this a lot more, I’m becoming more and more a believer in having very clear agreements in place, very clear expectations before a project starts with people. So there’s a lot of cultural work to be done, but there’s also like, “Here are the numbers. This is what this looks like, this is what you get, this is what I get. This is why it’s good for me, this is why it’s good for you.”

Musicians everywhere are struggling. I don’t ever want to go somewhere and be operating on vibes. So it’s a big combination of recognizing where people are coming from, being culturally sensitive, being proficient enough in the language or working with people who are proficient enough in the language and the culture to be able to actually understand what people are trying to tell you. That’s the human side, the softer cultural side. 

And then there’s just the hard-tack side of “What is this doing for you? Why are you giving me your time, your energy, your space, and how are we going to work it out?” It’s a combination. Every single one of them is a dance. Some of these relationships are like a couple days and we’re recording something, and some of these relationships are years and years and years and we’re building projects together and working as collaborators.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned that sometimes in your travels and your meeting musicians, you’ve had some transcendent experiences. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask for an example of a transcendent experience.

Cyrus: Yeah, there’s a lot of times where you’re like, “I can’t believe I’m here.” The original instinct behind this “Raw Music International” documentary series was to sort of bring you into the room while music was being created. 

One musician who really blew me away was Olima Anditi, who was a blind Kenyan guitarist. He was an itinerant musician traveling around these trucking routes between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and he had an incredible memory. He had hundreds of songs that he knew. In one song in particular, he would sing the names of all these birds, all the birds in the region, and he would say, “God gave this bird sight. Why did he take it from me?” He delighted people with this incredible ability to just dip in and out of this ancient history of the Luo people that live in western Kenya.

I saw him for the first time as a very young person in a bar that some friends had taken me to. It was like a homebrew bar and everyone was smoking and there were these drinks out of cans, and Olima was singing his music. I was like, “Oh, this is what I’ve heard about in books and movies. It’s happening right here.” [Laughing] Of course, that never happened again. 

There’s these moments much closer to home. I spent several years living in Chicago. The music scene there is extremely deep, extremely multi-generationally connected, and we would just see music happening in people’s homes or in backyards. It was the pandemic, so there was a lot of outdoor music, and I would be like, “I feel so privileged to be here right now, to be sharing this moment with people. This is an elevated scenario. This is not normal everyday life, and that’s what I’m seeking.”

Pier Carlo: I’d love to talk about your becoming the head of Mississippi Records. You’ve been there since 2019, right?

Cyrus: Yes.

Pier Carlo: But the company is 21 years old, so what was it like taking over, becoming the head of this legacy company? And in the last six years, what kind of mark did you want to make on the company?

Cyrus: Mississippi Records is a reissue record label that was founded in Portland, like you said, 21 years ago by Eric Isaacson and a group of other young Portland DIY punk anarchist types who just started releasing records that previously you could only get on much larger record labels. They started doing all this deep research and releasing these really beautiful hand-drawn covers and poetic titles without a lot of information and really deep cuts, like deep early blues and folk and American music to start and then expanding wider and wider.

I started hearing this music in college and as a young person was really inspired both by what I was hearing and also the way it was packaged. They were not packaging things; they were just releasing these art objects. But the way it was received by me was very different from the way I had previously heard “world music” or old music, which was in this very stodgy presentation with long liner notes by an expert and stiff lyric translations and like, “They play the instrument this way because of this and that.” This was like, “Here’s music that you can listen to the way you can listen to a punk tape or the way you could listen to a burned CDR and just appreciate it for what it is.”

Mississippi was doing that; Sublime Frequencies was doing that. It was a really liberating feeling where you’re like, “Oh, I can approach music from all over the world as if it’s music in New York, and I don’t need to know the history of whatever country it is. I can just appreciate it and listen to it.” Again, that was as a very young person.  Now I approach it a little bit differently and I do do a lot of research. One of the things that we do with the label is deep liner notes and long relationships with the artists. 

Which is all to say that the label was very inspirational to me, so I felt a responsibility to maintain the spirit of Mississippi, maintain what made it so unique and special amongst all these dozens of reissue labels that were popping up in a really kind of square and uninteresting way, in my opinion, while making it a little bit more functional, making it a little bit more streamlined so that it could ultimately pay more to artists and the families that we were working with. 

The other thing that I really wanted to make sure we did was that any project we released would be done in collaboration with the musician or their family or their community, that the money would be shared that way. In those early heady days of all these little punk labels, that wasn’t necessarily the case, partly because there was no money, because they’re selling the records so cheap, partly because they were quite isolated people in the Pacific Northwest who didn’t really know these artists. I felt like this lifetime of travel, this lifetime of being around the world put me in a unique position to make sure that the people who actually made the music were taken care of and that we had relationships with them.

Pier Carlo: Wow, so that involves a lot more research, especially if the musicians are deceased, right?

Cyrus: Yes, definitely, it involves a lot of research. That’s why the vast majority of projects that come our way just don’t happen because it’s a kind of miraculous series of factors that have to come together to make a project actually work for the label.

Pier Carlo: What reissue are you proudest of since you became the head of Mississippi Records?

Cyrus: There are a lot of them that have sort of distilled these ideas that we’ve been working with. One really important one was the issue of Brother Theotis Taylor’s music. He’s a gospel singer from south Georgia with this really sublime falsetto voice and this rolling piano style. We met Brother Taylor sort of by chance through Lonnie Holley and his manager. They were like, “Hey, do you guys want to meet a 92-year-old gospel piano singer?” when we were driving through Georgia one day, and we’re like, “Yes, of course.” That album led to a long relationship with Brother Taylor, who’s now passed on, and his son Hubert Taylor. Brother Taylor passed away at age 94.

We released his first album of home recordings. He signed the first recording contract of his entire career with us when he was in his 90s, which was something he was very proud of. When the record came out, it got written up in all these papers — The Guardian interviewed him — and so it felt like we were really able to show him a lot of appreciation and a good time after these decades and decades of making this beautiful music, which he was making not for public recognition but for very spiritual reasons. In some way, it was irrelevant that all this happened, but it was a nice cherry on top of all the work that he had done.

Pier Carlo: But he was well known in the community of artists and musicians.

Cyrus: Absolutely. He’s someone who could very well have been a huge name. He sang with Sam Cooke and played at The Apollo and Carnegie Hall even. But he was never interested in that; he was interested in music as a spiritual calling. As he always said, he was not a performer. He didn’t perform music; he channeled it. He was someone I admired very much. 

Through working with him, I met his son, Hubert Taylor, who had been helping his dad all these years but had also, through his own sort of spiritual calling, been collecting a massive archive of home video of his community, his family, music, barbecues, funerals, weddings in this small south Georgia town. 

Pier Carlo: Oh, did you get access to that?

Cyrus: Well, that’s now becoming a film that we’ve been working on for several years that will be released by PBS probably next year. That project just evolved into another project, and that’s one that really embodies what I really hope we can do, which is not only release this music —

Pier Carlo: And Hubert is very involved, I’m gathering?

Cyrus: Yeah, he’s the co-director on the film, so we’re in it together. These are the long-term relationships I’m talking about that I was looking for and I was interested in. I’m interested in the possibilities that arise through these collaborations, through this insider-outsider approach to working with the material. That’s one I really love, and I could just name a bunch more, but I’ll stop with that.

Pier Carlo: Clearly you were a fan of Lonnie Holley’s work before you approached him to collaborate. Could you talk about how you decided to work together, how you cultivated that relationship?

Cyrus: I had seen Lonnie Holley perform in New York years and years ago. I had no idea who he was. He was opening for another musician, and I was just stunned by him and his music and his lyrics. When I found out that he improvises every single song that he performs on the spot, I just couldn’t believe it. I started listening to everything I could, seeing him as often as I could. I just was the ultimate fan. I considered him at the time and still now one of the greatest living artists. 

I happened to see him at a small place in New York years later, ran into his manager, started talking, and they were like, “Hey, we’re working on a music video. Are you interested in working on this?” That music video turned into this longer film called “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” based on an 18-minute song of the same title by Lonnie. We just really got along early on. Lonnie has worked in almost every artform possible, but he’s never made a film, though he’s a huge fan of films. As a young person, he would sneak into the drive-in movie theater and watch the films secretly, but he didn’t have the audio, so he just imagined what they were saying. 

We ended up working on this project, and it was one of the first where I was able to very closely collaborate with an artist I respect to transmit or translate their visions into the medium of film, which, like I said, Lonnie knows and loves but he had never made a film. I saw that for us, our small film crew, our job was to take all these ideas Lonnie has and be like, “OK, how does that look when you have a very small budget and a very small team, and how do you translate that into film?” We called it a science-fiction documentary in the end. It was very much about Lonnie, and it was about Lonnie’s creative process and reflecting how Lonnie moves through time and his interactions with certain objects, but there’s also a lot of imagination and play involved as well.

Pier Carlo: It’s beautiful because it also features a lot of his visual art.

Cyrus: Yes, yes. Like all my favorite artists, Lonnie’s work is all tied into his life. There’s no border between it. These are all reflections of who he is and where he’s at, so yeah, it only made sense that that would be a big part of what we were doing.

Pier Carlo: You’ve worked now with musicians of all ages who’ve worked across different eras of music and genres. What do you hear from them about how the ecosystem of music has evolved? What is it like for them to make music today in the 21st century in the age of Spotify and Apple Music, if it’s at all relevant to them?

Cyrus: It’s probably harder than ever to be a musician and make a living from it because there aren’t a lot of outlets for getting paid as an artist. A lot of the musicians I work with, they’re not immune to that but they … . I don’t want to say that the current climate of music and the music industry and music-making and getting paid for your music is irrelevant to a lot of the artists I work with because they’re almost always working people, working with really small budgets, trying to make their projects and their artwork happen regardless of the larger economic landscape, so it is relevant in that they need to make a living, but it’s also not relevant because they are making this work for larger reasons, often for the people closest to them, their communities.

Pier Carlo: Spiritual, you said.

Cyrus: It could be spiritual. Yeah, there’s a lot of reasons behind it, but it’s not really for Spotify and Apple Music, and that to me is beautiful, that in a time of artistic abundance when everything is available on a dot, I love the people who are like, “It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not for you. You don’t get this just because you want it.” That to me is an artistic choice as well as a political choice. It does mean you have to think about how to exist in a very brutal climate and country without some of those things. Again, that to me is really powerful and really gives me a lot of hope that there are people all over the world choosing to do this.

Mississippi straddles that line between making this music available, hopefully getting people paid a little bit while not just dumping it into the ether of free AI-generated content. It’s nice to know that secrets still exist, that things outside of these ecosystems still exist. There are people creating art not for the masses. When I get to hear that, I feel really grateful for it, and I also have to decide alongside the artists if that means it should or should not be released. There’s plenty of stuff that we’ve heard that I love that will just never come out because it’s not meant for that. It’s not meant for that audience.

Pier Carlo: Oh, say more about that.

Cyrus: I think it is just that we live in a time of plenty. We live in a time when artists are expected to just give everything they have for free, and there are a lot of people willing to do that.

Pier Carlo: Right. And the expectation is the consumer can just click the button and have access to an infinite amount of entertainment and art.

Cyrus: Exactly. They can get it, and they don’t have to think about it. They don’t have to care who it is that made it or where it came from or why it was created. It’s just there and it’s available. There are millions of people willing to do that and more than happy to fall off the side of a bridge to take a selfie. And that’s great. Let them do that. 

But to me, the real artists are the people who are doing it for other reasons, who can find ways to exist through their communities or through other means of making money while creating this stuff that has nothing to do with this larger atmosphere. Again, the challenge as a label is recognizing that, seeking that, idealizing that as one of the higher forms of creation while also being in the business of releasing things to larger groups of people and to the larger populations. So when you do come into those special moments where you’re engaged with musicians and artists who are operating at a higher level, you are grateful to hear it, and you don’t always have to put it out. You can just say, “I’m glad I got to hear that, thank you.” And that’s, again, something I had to learn over a long period of time.

Pier Carlo: Is that a decision that you make or the artist makes?

Cyrus: Oh, that’s completely driven by the artist. I see myself the same way as a documentary filmmaker and sort of compiler and archivist in music. My work is transmitting other people’s art into different mediums. I have my vision for it and I’m going to step in when I know that I have a good idea or that I know something about this field, but really a lot of the decisions about how the music is approached come directly from the artists and come through these long conversations.

Pier Carlo: How has the music impacted your filmmaking? How are you a different filmmaker through the music you’ve heard and the musicians you’ve worked with?

Cyrus: That’s a really good question. I think my favorite times in filmmaking have been when I’ve been documenting a live music performance and I’ve felt that I’m not participating in the musical performance but also not just being there. I’m operating on a similar wavelength to the musician, so I know where to stand, where to move the camera, where to operate. When I’m really feeling it and I’m really in it, I can anticipate what’s happening in the song, even if I’ve never heard the song before, and in that way, I’m feeling like I’m part of, like I said, [laughing] not in the band but like a cool roadie who knows what’s going on. I’m not in the crowd, but I’m not in the band either. I get to move with them and feel like I’m operating on their level.

Music and film are so different because music in my favorite forms is one that happens live, that happens in front of you. It could be improvised and spontaneous, but even if it’s not, it’s a specific coming together of sounds and energies in a certain space that creates immediate reaction in the audience, whereas film spends years and years and years trying to build a similar reaction. It just comes from a different angle. It’s a collaborative field with dozens of different people involved, tinkering infinitely with timing and movement and color in order to get what happens in that explosive moment in music.

And they both work and they’re both really interesting, and they both do what they do in important and enlightening ways. I learn a lot from each genre, but I really love when the spontaneity of music can be brought into film. I’m always trying to keep my eyes open, keep nimble, keep moving. Werner Herzog is one of my favorite film directors, and I’ve seen videos of him directing. He’s bear-hugging the camera person and moving with him. They’re sort of dancing together while he’s listening. I’m like, “I get that.” You have to be tapped in and involved in the movement. So yeah, music has taught me to listen.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned one project you’re currently working on, but looking at the rest of the year, what creative projects are you particularly excited about?

Cyrus: Well, definitely the film about Brother Theotis Taylor that I’m working on with Hubert Taylor, his son, is really exciting and taking up a lot of energy. Another project that recently came together is by a Rwandan musician named Bizimungu Dieudonne. His tape was shared with me by a friend many years ago, and I’ve been trying to track down his family. Finally I met a really amazing Rwandan journalist who was able to track down his surviving family. He had been killed during the genocide in the ’90s, and so we’ve been in touch with them. They’re very excited about releasing his music, bringing back his memory and his stories. 

I’m excited about that project because it’s always nice when you reach out to someone and say, “Hey, I’ve somehow heard this music that is otherwise very hard to find. I’m interested in releasing it,” and they share that interest. They’re like, “This is important to us. We want this to be out there too.” That always means a lot to me and usually leads to a really powerful project and something that we all learn from, so I’m looking forward to that one. Plus, it’s a dark story but it’s upbeat music. We’ve been doing a lot of really serious music lately, so I’m looking forward to some jams.