A Lifetime Isn’t Enough

Grammy-winning producer/conflict resolution specialist Ian Brennan and Italian-Rwandan photographer/filmmaker Marilena Delli Umuhoza have long provided platforms for the under-represented with an emphasis on women, the elderly and persecuted groups. That this often beautiful, frequently harrowing recording comes with a trigger warning is fitting. The song titles are staggering, encompassing the respective stories of these first time, first take singers and musicians. There are no translations – titles and emotions are enough.

Over 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the Kosovo War, an armed conflict fought from March 1998 to June 1999 by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo Liberation Army. Thousands of women and girls were brutalised, sexually assaulted and raped. The artists captured here communicate their experiences by repeating the same phrase over and again (‘never forget’), or by communing non-verbally about their shared experience (‘They Took Me from My Parents’) or singing to drum accompaniment in a rasping, melismatic voice laden with memories and feeling (‘I Searched the Prisons for My Husband for Two Years After the War’). As the world teeters toward fascism and greater division, this recording comes as a clarion call: a short, sharp, essential shock.