Muslimgauze - Vampires, Narcotics and Prophets

Bryn “Muslimgauze” Jones has all the credentials to rank at the top of any hypothetical league table of candidates for obscurity, prolixity or controversy, all parameters that in his case went brilliantly hand in hand. Between scattered, cryptic statements, an uncompromising political conscience bordering on extremism, and a body of work running into the hundreds — in an era that had not yet experienced the bulimia of Retromania and digital files — the Muslimgauze discography unfolded at the margins of the industry for barely a decade and a half, leaving behind a number of questions, records and contradictions sufficient to feed a career many times more celebrated.

An ambiguity that an early death at thirty-seven could only help feed the legend of a figure already ascribed to a (albeit underground) myth.

Like any character who is anything but straightforward or given to universal claims, his body of work has been read alternately as an impressive pile of merits and failures. If the latter owe something to the prolixity of an output that, on the surface, seems barely justified, detached from any sense of completeness or synthesis, on the other hand Muslimgauze's contribution was seminal, tangible and in many ways unmatched in conveying politically militant messages — themselves, moreover, inherited from the radical industrial manifesto — wrapped in an unusually conceived ethno-ambient body, forged in the murky workshops of the late industrial scene. A genesis that partly explains the uniqueness of Bryn Jones's project and sets it apart from the noisy self-celebrations of world music (whose wake it does occasionally latch onto here and there), from refined Fourth World intellectualism, or from assorted orientalisms.

Muslimgauze is neither a cold description, nor an interpretation, nor participant observation — in fact, Jones never once set foot in the Middle East. His sympathy for the PLO and various postcolonial figures, his unequivocal condemnation of Israel and of American influence in the Middle East and the Maghreb, as well as his frequent fixation on a single frame of war, carries the emotional charge of a deeply human empathy and a crossing of borders — those built on geopolitics and those built on otherness. Of the colonized and the colonizer.

The music can be listened to without an appreciation of its political origin, but I hope that after listening the person asks why it’s called what it is and from this finds out more about the subject. It’s up to them. Go out and discover.

Opaques (Product Kinematograph, 1983)

The first stirrings of the Muslimgauze story can be traced back to the early Eighties, with Bryn Jones a twenty-year-old from Manchester struck by the industrial scandal that was sweeping through English warehouses alongside an already dying punk wave, in particular a memorable Throbbing Gristle performance in Manchester that he attended at just seventeen. A couple of tapes as E.G. Oblique Graph introduce him into the British industrial micro-universe, but it's in 1982 that he decides to get serious, symbolically renaming himself Muslimgauze, an adaptation of “muslin” and “gauze”, later reworked to make explicit the sought-after connection with the Middle East.

After the LP Kabul, 1983 then brings Opaques, a six-track tape that offers a number of fresh, innovative ideas as it progressively distances itself from an otherwise — however difficult and underground — “typical” sound. The album opens with a dedication to Milena Jesenska, the Czech writer who fell victim to the Holocaust, an unsettling “minimal” piece (an adjective we'll need to reach for often throughout Jones's discography), dragging itself along on a lobotomized synthetic beat and a pseudo-liturgical loop that winds back on itself at the track's end. “Cyst” and “Anatomy” carry the discourse forward with further references to hymns and marches that blur the line between religion and state propaganda, but also with an attention to synthesized rhythm, austere yet ambiguously melodic in its own way, that brings it closer to certain things by Monoton or Borghesia than to industrial narratives.

Any lingering, however vague, melodic temptations are discouraged, however, by the album's closing track, the harrowing “Taoist”, a shadowy eighteen-minute ambient-industrial collage built on ritual objects that throws a bridge toward contemporaries :zoviet*france:, but also anticipates some of the more experimental work of Coil.

The debt owed to (the best of) everything circulating in England's basements was thus settled. The next step was to carve out his own, highly peculiar artistic field of action, amid the horrors of the Persian Gulf, the invasion of Lebanon and the first stirrings of a renewed jihadist fervor.

Abu Nidal (Limited Editions, 1987)

Four years and four albums later comes Abu Nidal, an album that definitively and entirely reframes the Muslimgauze project in a new light. The work is dedicated to the activist of the same name who founded the Palestinian Revolutionary Council, and explores the dramatic unfolding of events in the Middle East that ignites the ethical question of the invader and of “justified violence” — a conflict that Jones, however, does not hesitate to take a clear stance on, without false diplomacy, in the very few interviews he gave to specialist fanzines during the period.

The first half of the record is made up precisely of the three-part suite (or rather, “versions”) “Gulf War”, built on “tribal” or Arabic-tinged rhythms looping continuously, into which other disruptive elements creep in: fragments of some acoustic sampling, voices, and above all plenty of field recordings.

The second half, by contrast, takes on more emotional tones, with the title track riding a brisk loop of Middle Eastern rhythms wrapped in an icy ambient spiral that occasionally spills over into unexpected cosmic territory, but also, and above all, with the ethno-ambient collage of “Green Is The Color Of The Prophet”, an excellent track that aims for a sly orientalism in the guise of a postmodern theocratic revival, and which wouldn't be out of place in the songbook of certain Dead Can Dance (the “The Serpent's Egg”-era kind). The concept then comes full circle in the closing “Fatwa – Religious Decree Giving Recourse To Terrorism”, which stylistically and thematically sums up the whole work.

Abu Nidal is the indispensable pivot around which Muslimgauze's ethno-ambient exploration is built, a drift that has little or nothing to do with the parallel rise of the "world music" phenomenon, and which stands on one hand as a further, unauthorized development of certain industrial intuitions already present in the "Zoviet" workshops, and on the other as one of the most refined points in Jones's entire output.

Zul'm (Extreme, 1992)

Straddling the two decades, Jones gradually moved closer to the more club-oriented electronic tendencies, exploring the already intrinsic affinities with techno movements, which in England had by then already been sublimated into the acid of the summer of love. If albums like Iran, The Rape Of Palestine and Uzi were tentative attempts to incorporate 4/4 beats into the Muslimgauze blueprint, Zul'm brings that happy marriage to fruition and opens up an entire, substantial chapter in Jones's discography.

Released, like its predecessors Intifaxa and United States Of Islam, on the esteemed Extreme label, Zul'm contains some of the most engaging episodes in Jones's entire output: from the punjab-dance of "Fakir", to the minimal-techno of "Curfew, Gaza", to the gorgeous, spice-laden raga of tabla and unidentified loops on "Afghan Black", all the way to the almost hip-hop of "Indian Summer Of Benazir Bhutto", dedicated to the famously outspoken Pakistani premier of the same name, and the ethno-ambient expanses of "Tehran Via Train" and "Shiva Hooka", animated by surprising electronic pulses. The seven tracks of Zul'm - varied yet coherent - represent the best that an ethno-electro fusion updated for the Nineties could offer. An undertaking that keeps Jones firmly rooted in the here-and-now, aesthetically as well as politically. An immersion that might have fully blossomed through the collaboration with 808 State that never quite came to completion, but which in any case refreshes the project in a different key, even more inclusive and ever more undefinable and enigmatic.

Vote Hezbollah (Soleilmoon, 1993)

Just six months later Muslimgauze landed on the glorious Soleilmoon label, which would go on to release several of his significant output, including both of the two memorable LPs put out in 1993. The first, dedicated "to the liberation of Palestine", is Vote Hezbollah, an album that continues along the path marked by Zul'm, with an even more pronounced leaning toward the electronic component. The album consists of thirteen tracks that camouflage, within the techno-ambient furrow of the time, loops, voices and acoustic incursions that turn the genre's generally and happily estranged character into a threatening, precariously "dark" mood.

Unlike the previous work, Vote Hezbollah is not built from solid individual entities, but unfolds uniformly in a trance-like state in which, on several occasions, Jerusalem seems to dissolve only to re-emerge on the beaches of Goa.

While the nod to the nascent ambient-hallucinogenic scene is evident, the album nonetheless maintains a brilliant balance between a thoroughly enjoyable trip and an ever-alert dark undercurrent, steering clear of easy cliché. In many ways, it's the most accessible Muslimgauze record for a more typically "electro" audience.

Veiled Sisters (Soleilmoon, 1993)

Bryn Jones's contribution to the electronic ethno-trance vein, however, reaches its creative peak with the following double album, Veiled Sisters. Accompanied as usual by classy artwork, Veiled Sisters further stretches out time - to be understood here in an "other" sense too - presenting itself essentially as a flow, a continuous variation on a single motif that spreads across more than two hours, yet which at various moments seems to aim toward an eternity beyond all ontology.

The fundamental theme is once again the occupation of Palestine, the PLO, but the condition of being colonized is here extended to other levels as well, as suggested by the sound material, drawn from or inspired predominantly by the Indian subcontinent, where Goa this time is merely the port of call from which to investigate the recesses of a less plasticized world. It's from a notably heightened state of consciousness that the first portion of the work seems to arise, projected as it is onto a subtle aura of melancholy and transcendence, in which fragments of lived experience, geopolitics, minimal carpets of sound, percussion, industrial echoes and brief acoustic samples follow one another, blowing without any set trajectory yet captivating, vivid as hallucinations. The second part instead leans toward a darker ambience and a more heterogeneous rhythmic approach, without straying too far from the solution - or the quality - set out by the first three tracks.

Regarded by many devotees as the summa of Muslimgauze's entire body of work, Veiled Sisters is undoubtedly Jones's most evocative and emotional record, one that clearly foregrounds his idea of "open" composition - that is, the continuous, obsessive reworking of ideas and samples, an idea that operates on the multiple possibilities of perspective - often a perspective on one and the same sample dissected ad infinitum - rather than on traditionally understood songwriting. This partly explains Muslimgauze's sprawling discography, and it's something that Veiled Sisters begins to definitively bring to the surface: further variations on the same theme would in fact belong to the album's sessions, some of them particularly worthwhile, collected posthumously on Untitled (2000).

Izlamaphobia (Staalplaat, 1995)

Muslimgauze's output then started to become bulimic, in a programmatic incontinence that saw him release every recording deemed worthy without clinging to any pretense of completeness.

After no fewer than six albums released in 1994 (among which at least the excellent Al-Zulfiquar Shaheed deserves mention), 1995 was marked by the more ambitious Izlamaphobia, a work that on one hand seems to reconnect more directly with its political counterpart, and on the other explores new scenarios, rawer and more disturbing than the ethno-ambient suggestions to which he seemed to have devoted the entire first half of the Nineties. The double LP consists of thirty-three fragmentary, destabilizing tracks, in which the use of loops, hiss, stop&go and frequency games becomes almost obsessive, as brilliantly summed up by the opening "Hudood Ordinance", in whose tangle of abrasive sounds and streaked bass the rust of heavy industry re-emerges.

Stylistically the rest of the album ranges from breakbeat to hip-hop to a certain frontier trip-hop, but rather than lingering in the reassuring genre identities of the moment, Jones seems to draw on them only to sketch out skeletons on which to stage violent "acid-arab" visions, to use a post-millennium expression. More often, Izlamaphobia seems to (re)discover affinities with certain contemporary reincarnations of the industrial monsters – Ben Ponton's Horizon 222, Rapoon and Richard H. Kirk's post-Cabaret Voltaire – but roughened up and updated to the hangover of a rave waking up in the dust of Baghdad. Izlamaphobia is one of Jones's most extreme and uncompromising works – though far from inaccessible – and his most ambitious legacy, probably still unsurpassed in its vision of an avant-garde arab-electro-industrial, a conversation that would in fact only be picked up again some fifteen years later, one to which names like Mutamassik and Filastine would light more than a little incense.

Return Of Black September (Staalplaat, 1996)

Having settled with Staalplaat, for whom he would release dozens upon dozens of LPs, CD-Rs and singles, Muslimgauze continues his momentum with another series of well-received works, such as Gun Aramaic and Uzbekistani Bizarre & Souk, but it's above all the excellent Return Of Black September that stands out the following year, thanks to a new formula that brings the ambient component back to the fore after the breakbeat frenzy of Izlamaphobia. While the album, whose title references the Palestinian terrorist organization, clearly falls within an "ethno" framework – thanks to the usual privileged focus on percussion, played almost entirely by Jones himself, and on "oriental-sounding" samples – Return Of Black September often reaches dark-ambient depths rarely explored until then, recalling the abyssal sound of Vidna Obmana and some of Pete Namlook's work.

The heart of the album revolves around the suites "Lybia" and "Thugghee", which dissect the typical acoustic samples until they're left crawling in circles like drones. The ambience is consequently intensely hypnotic and nocturnal, dragged along by the extended sound of echoes and rhythmic death-rattles that seem to advance, unsettling and muffled, like the unidentified feline on the cover. In every respect, Muslimgauze's "ambient" masterpiece.

Narcotic (Staalplaat, 1997)

Between 1997 and 1998 Muslimgauze released no fewer than eighteen works, including three collaborations (with Sonar, Rootsman and Les Joyaux de la Princesse), with an outpouring of energy and ideas that has few equals in the history of recorded music. The first release of the year is probably also the most memorable. Narcotic seems to take stock of the results achieved over the previous five years, filtering and distilling the many insights into an album that is, this time, (relatively) more traditional. From the belly dance of "Medina Flight" to the minimal trance of "Believers Of The Blind" to the tribal ambient of "Effendi", Narcotic is a Babel-like sequence of small gems by now identifiable only as "Muslimgauze". Adding further color to the record are the unusual – and touching – exclusively acoustic interludes such as "Saddam's Children" and the three-part title track, which culminates in a subdued duet of oud and percussion crossed by sporadic electronic frequencies, undoubtedly among the most "catchy" moments of the entire Muslimgauze enterprise.

If you ever had to pick just one Jones record to hand to aliens to best introduce them to the "gauze" sound, Narcotic would be the obvious choice, without a moment's hesitation.

The Gulf Between Us (Soleilmoon, 1997)

In the ocean of this artist's output there are also numerous EPs – around thirty – generally little more than sketches explored further elsewhere on full-length albums. Among these, though, the evocative Gulf Between Us stands out, a single twenty-three-minute composition in which Jones flirts more explicitly with dub structures. It's a dazed movement, a hypnotic sway between reverb and impalpable synthetic melodies (think here of some African Head Charge material), which, as the minutes pass, take over in a disturbing way, almost drowning the percussion down to a merely ornamental role. The piece would be revisited and reworked on the parallel Narcotic, but it's in this enjoyable EP – accompanied by artwork showing an aerial view of the Persian Gulf – that the idea is spelled out in all its dreamlike potential.

Mullah Said (Staalplaat, 1998)

At the peak of his prolific streak, then, Jones released his last great masterpiece, one that would, sadly, be remembered by many as his epitaph. Mullah Said picks up the "flowing" format of Veiled Sisters, but this time the hallucination has more the character of a troubled half-sleep than the expansive breadth of a trip at the end of the world, starting with the call of a muezzin that runs through the whole album. The compositions are fluid and gentle, marked by Middle Eastern strings, sitar and unfathomable echoing voices, ferried along by a tiptoeing dub-techno in perpetual reverb.

Mullah Said has all it takes to be Jones's definitive work – the distinctive style, the compelling form, the gorgeous photos in the booklet, titles that are like bullets – and indeed it remains, to this day, the Manchester musician's best-known and most highly rated record.

Bryn Jones left this world at just thirty-seven, due to complications from a fungal infection. Palestine, meanwhile, is still not a free territory, and the Middle East, Iran and Pakistan are anything but purged of terrorism, extremism and petrodollars. Perhaps this is also why the myth of Muslimgauze resonates today louder and more influential than ever (Helm, Vatican Shadow, Shackleton have all more or less explicitly acknowledged the influence of Jones's work), while the flood of posthumous releases shows no sign of abating, just as the incredible well of recorded and never-released material from which the most disparate labels keep drawing, adding further titles to the already thriving discography he actively built up in his lifetime. Among these, at the very least worth having are the excellent Baghdad (2000) and Speaker Of Turkish (2006), but – as one will have gathered by now – in every single release under the Muslimgauze name there are points of interest, ecstasy and healthy unease to be found. As befits, after all, any great name in (un?)popular music of any era.

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