Mesinai began experimenting with cassettes and sampling at the age of 10, and at 14, was discovered by musician
Juma Sultan while creating music for breakdancers on the streets of New York City. Juma gave him a Multi-Vox Tape Echo machine and a ribbon microphone to produce his early work. In the early 1990s, Mesinai formed the group Sub Dub with John Ward. The group is credited as an integral part of the founding of the
illbient genre. His 2001 album,
The Unspeakable, featured unreleased music that he composed for the
Hellraiser 6 soundtrack. The material was rejected after being considered "too scary for the movie".
The Wire described Mesinai's
Soldier of Midian (2001) as "explod[ing] with Middle Eastern percussion, Persian horn samples and dulcimer licks played by an ensemble of genuine Middle Eastern musicians, then cut up with a major dose of studio tricnology." Mesinai's album
Badawi: The Heretic of Ether (1999), was used as the template for the score to the blockbuster film,
Black Hawk Down. This experience led him to coin the term "Score Design" and led to work creating music for major motion pictures, including
The Fountain, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and
A Late Quartet. In 2004, Mesinai was awarded the Sundance Composers Lab Fellowship, where he worked on scores for
Sundance Directors. In 2016, Mesinai released a collaborative film that he directed and scored with Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, titled
Tunnel Vision. The film and its music explores subterranean frequencies and was recorded in tunnels and caves, and mixed as a dub record.
Tunnel Vision explores a narrative format created by Mesinai called "Dub Fiction," or "a form of storytelling utilizing various mediums of modern technology to create elastic narratives which can be manipulated and, essentially, remixed by others." Mesinai has taught master classes in music production, sound design and film scoring at
UCSD,
The New School, Dub Spot, and
NYU. In 2015, Mesinai founded the artist development organization the "Underground Producers Alliance", also acting as a school for teaching extended techniques in music production and sound design to professionals, along with co founders producers
Scotty Hard (
Jungle Brothers, New Kingdom),
Prince Paul (
De La Soul), Honeychild Coleman (
The Slit)) and
HPrizm (Anti Pop Consortium). ==Discography==