Shimmer, Then Disappear
Some five years ago, I read about a musician called Muslimgauze that piqued my interest-slightly. It was one man, Bryn Jones, from Manchester, England, making “controversial” Middle Eastern music on a shoestring budget and supposedly releasing records at a fanatical pace. Jones was not a practicing Muslim and never once visited the Middle East, but was hell-bent on promoting Islam-related “causes” through his music. At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that information. It seemed like a bit much, more than just music, and besides, Middle Eastern music wasn’t my thing; if it had to be “World,” let it be Cuban, Icelandic, or Japanese. (I have a hunch that I wasn’t alone: Middle Eastern music can sound difficult and alienating to most Western ears unaccustomed to the stuff.) So I let it pass by without giving it even a cursory listen, discovered music more aligned with my tastes, and moved on.
Then, about a month ago, I read Pitchfork staff writer Mark Richardson’s unthinkably eloquent monthly column, Resonant Frequency, and it brought everything back. Richardson usually writes about music that I enjoy, both in his Pitchfork reviews and his Resonant Frequency column, and I’d like to think that we hear music in a similar way. The subject of his last column was Muslimgauze, and he wrote about what Muslimgauze meant to Jones, the effect of the music on a Western listener, and the implications behind the music itself. (I encourage everyone here to read it; it’s a fascinating character study and a beautiful, incisive piece of writing.) Richardson mentioned that his first and favorite Muslimgauze record (bought on a whim, as most Muslimgauze records have little to no identifying information on them) was Jaal ab Dullah, and I trust his recommendations, so I bought Jaal ab Dullah at Amoeba Music in Hollywood and gave it a spin.
Now. I’ve been listening to indie music since I was fairly young and have a propensity for the experimental, so I’ve heard a lot of weird shit. I’d never heard anything like Jaal ab Dullah. The music sounded like it was made entirely with live instrumentation and recorded onto old analog equipment (which it was-Jones never used computers, sequencers, or anything digital), without regard for typical song length, song structure, or volume levels-indeed, some of the sounds would move from barely audible to deafening in the blink of an eye. There was a kind of odd hip-hop influence running through the record-the beats bang and groove in bottom-heavy fashion-but it was combined with strange Arabic instrumentation that made me wonder if Jones had ever heard N.W.A or Public Enemy in his life. Jaal ab Dullah is loud, and the first few times I switched it on without remembering to turn the volume down made me jump out of my chair. This album was foreign, perversely seductive, and so startlingly violent in its execution that it made me wonder-with my experimental music fetish-how I’d ever managed to overlook it. It quickly became one of my favorite records.
As I spent some time with Jaal ab Dullah, I read about Muslimgauze in detail in order to get the full story. And boy, was there a story. First, let it be known that Bryn Jones is no longer with us; he died of a rare blood disease in early 1999. His career as Muslimgauze began in 1982 when Israel incited a military occupation of Lebanon, and Jones released three records that year as a reaction: Extended Play, Piano Room, and Triptych. Not only did Jones focus his career terrifyingly closely on the Middle East, he aligned himself ideologically with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and pretty much anything else in the Middle East that directly opposed the philosophies and actions of Israel and the United States. From 1982 until pretty much the day he died, he kept releasing records at breakneck speed-fifteen records in 1996, nine records in 1997 and an unfathomable sixteen records in 1998. There are now 192 official Muslimgauze CDs floating around in the world, and even more music in the vaults that has yet to be pressed. This guy was, um, pretty busy.
His beliefs didn’t show up explicitly in the music; put this stuff on and all you might think was that it was instrumental, kind of freaky and referenced both quick-n-dirty electronica and Arabic music. Instead, Jones got his point across through the packaging. A CD cover might contain a picture of an Arab leader, or a young Muslim girl holding a machine gun, or a sepia-toned scene of a desert (as appears on Jaal ab Dullah). The song and album titles are meant to provoke strong reactions from those who oppose his beliefs (The Rape of Palestine and Vote Hezbollah are both album titles, and one song on Izlamaphobia is called “Israeli Bullet Passing Through the Body of a Palestinian Child”). The booklet of one of the CDs I own, called Alms for Iraq, contains pictures of Iraqi children so bloodied and mutilated that news networks wouldn’t dare broadcast them. So Jones, with his unpopular beliefs, obsessive focus and the ridiculous amount of CDs he recorded, could correctly be called a fanatic. Yet to leave it at that would be missing the point of what makes Muslimgauze so strange, and so strangely alluring. Wasn’t this a white guy? From England? Who didn’t even practice the religion of the people with whom he felt solidarity? What’s going on here?
The “solidarity” he felt toward the Palestinians among others is thorny, and not what you might expect. It’s clear from looking at Jones’ titles, artwork, press releases, and interviews with fringe publications that his view on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is incredibly black-and-white. For Jones, there was simply no room for Israelis in Palestine and they had to leave. (Jones never explicitly referred to this, as far as I know, but I don’t think he’d be entirely opposed to the idea of using terrorism to drive the enemy out). He thought the U.S. and Israel were inherently evil and that their so-called oppression of Palestinians, Iraqis, and other Muslims was heartless and meant only to kill innocent people. Essentially, Muslimgauze is agitprop that doesn’t bother to examine both sides of the conflict, and many a reviewer has pointed this out. At the risk of stepping into “psychologist mode” (an especially sticky proposition considering that Jones has passed away), it may have been that Jones was driven more by his emotions than by politics. His albums seem to have been born from rage that comes with a controversial event, rather than the specifics of the event itself. (For example, Betrayal, another album I own, was recorded in 1993 mere days after the initial peace treaty between Israel and the PLO. The album cover depicts the fated handshake between Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in a sickening pink hue, and Jones must have felt this “Betrayal” so strongly that it replaced the release of another album set for the same date). Viewed in that way, it’s conceivable that Jones had picked the Middle Eastern conflict out of a hat filled with topical issues, and that he could have built up the same anger at other oppressors out there if he had set his sights on something different.
After all, Jones was a loner, oppressed by the world himself. He didn’t have friends, did few collaborations with other musicians and very rarely played live or granted interviews. He probably didn’t have much of a love life; the idea of him having sex with a woman is damn near preposterous. Most importantly, he didn’t convene with other Muslims and didn’t care at all what the Muslim community thought of his recordings. It was, then, a personal mission to turn his anger into as many compact discs in as little time as possible, as though by releasing sixteen albums in a year he could quell his feelings (even though it was clear that by 1999 his rage still burned; he recorded albums even around the time he died in January). Jones’ own status as a loner who didn’t care about other people’s opinions must have resonated in the outer limits of independent music listeners, and today, as it was when Jones was alive, Muslimgauze doesn’t attract Muslims or PLO supporters as much as it attracts fellow loners who could identify with Jones’ emotional turmoil.
The fact that Jones didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone but himself thought of his music meant that Muslimgauze was free to break just about every musical convention that existed. Songs might go on past the 10-minute mark, well after they’ve stopped developing, or they might last less than 30 seconds, but the standard-issue 3-to-4-minute song is a rarity in Muslimgauze’s catalogue. A track title and the music that accompanied it would often have nothing to do with each other; to reinforce that point, songs on the same album would have exactly the same title and be completely different songs (the two occurrences of “Shimmer, Then Disappear” on Jaal ab Dullah sound nothing alike), while the same music would appear on multiple tracks (Jaal ab Dullah’s “Benazir Bhutto’s Hands Are Clean” and “Bright Shadows” are essentially identical). A song on Jaal ab Dullah called “Ultra Orthodox and No Cheating” goes nearly eight minutes with barely a change of note, and then, in the last 20 seconds, one of Muslimgauze’s best beats jumps out of the speakers and tears right through you (factoid: that beat is now my ringtone). Some albums in his discography would sound to the untrained ear like mere repeats, such that you didn’t entirely need to own one if you owned another. That cheap, analog sound was practically anathema for musicians recording around the same time, as was the even cheaper packaging. And then, of course, there’s that unbelievable release schedule to consider, one that no musician with a healthy mind and more than a slight desire to make money would be able to pull off. Taking all of this into consideration, Muslimgauze can be approached as its own self-referential sound world, answerable only to itself, and be enjoyed purely on that level. Nothing sounds like this.
Yet Jones clearly wanted Muslimgauze to be more than just music, and if I started comparing him to other artists without regard to the entire Muslimgauze ethic, Jones would be rolling in his grave. The truth is, I can’t listen to a Muslimgauze record without thinking about the PLO, anti-U.S. sentiments, and the man who roiled behind the mixing board. As a Jewish American, I represent what Jones considered to be the face of evil. Turn the equation around and it becomes even worse: By listening to what Jones created, it’s as though he’s implicating me in his quest to rid the world of American and Israeli power. Not surprisingly, this can make me feel guilty; I’d never share my taste for Muslimgauze with my Jewish parents or even to very many of my friends. But his unpopular opinion makes me sympathize with him (after all, I’ve held many of my own unpopular opinions too), and I can identify with his feeling that he and his “people” were victimized. There’s something very indie rock about feeling as though you’re the little guy swimming upstream, which may explain why he reached a devoted grip of "normal music" listeners despite his anti-Semitic views, the limited quantities of his CDs that were printed, and the strangeness of the music itself. Moreover, with nearly 200 albums to his name, exploring Muslimgauze’s career has become a kind of collection process for me. I still remember which Muslimgauze CDs I bought in which order: Jaal ab Dullah was my first, followed by Lo-Fi India Abuse, then Syrinjia, then Alms for Iraq, then Betrayal, then Hummus, and Farouk Enjineer and Vote Hezbollah are both on the way. And though his music does repeat itself (with that many albums and no switches in the equipment utilized, it’s inevitable), small changes in approach become gigantic in context, and I feel as though I’m getting a fresh look at Muslimgauze with each release I buy. Jaal ab Dullah is perhaps most representative of Late Period Muslimgauze (earlier efforts were more ambient and less sonically violating) and probably the best executed, but I love all of my Muslimgauze albums and I wouldn’t give any of them up.
So far, I haven’t really made a connection between the music and all of the wrapping it comes in, but in fact, there is one, and it may be the single most crucial thing that makes Muslimgauze particularly scary. The anger that Bryn Jones felt toward the world came through not only in the diatribes he spit in interviews and the photos he chose to include in the booklets, but also in the music itself, however indirectly. Interestingly though, the rage never spills over into madness, instead maintaining a kind of stone-faced equanimity, as a cold-blooded killer might when hunting someone down. With all of the clanging and banging, the blasted technoid beats and the genuinely humorless melodies, the music bears an uncanny resemblance to that thing that Jones might not be opposed to if the need for it arose: terrorism. Muslimgauze may have been Jones’ way of fighting the forces of evil as a one-man army-the way a terrorist would-with furiousness streamlined into terrifying resolve. Those beats are so powerful and the noises so ugly that they make the listener a kind of victim, or perhaps an accomplice, depending on which side is taken. It sounds like a horrible way to spend your music listening life, but if you’re ever particularly angry at someone or something, it’s one of the best cathartic releases you could ever put to work.
So Muslimgauze is “more than just music,” though the music itself is wonderful, and of course, wholly unique. For an experimental music connoisseur, a library is incomplete without having at least Jaal ab Dullah sitting on the shelf. I can even picture those with a taste for hardcore rap and hardcore metal digging this stuff, if only for its loud volumes and unrelenting extremity. But I just can’t listen to Muslimgauze without thinking about Jones-how truly original he was in the music world, how much he would have hated my very being and yet how much I still love what he did, how huge and complicated the emotional requirements are when approaching anything in his catalogue. Mark Richardson mentioned in a review of Hamas Cinema Gaza Strip that Jones’ death in 1999 was evidence of a higher power. He meant that if Jones had seen everything going on today-far, far too much conflict to name here-he would have driven himself crazy. He’s probably right. For now, what we have is the portrait of a man who was more committed to his art than just about anyone I can name, and who made incredible, inimitable records as a result of that commitment.
Bryn Jones
Then, about a month ago, I read Pitchfork staff writer Mark Richardson’s unthinkably eloquent monthly column, Resonant Frequency, and it brought everything back. Richardson usually writes about music that I enjoy, both in his Pitchfork reviews and his Resonant Frequency column, and I’d like to think that we hear music in a similar way. The subject of his last column was Muslimgauze, and he wrote about what Muslimgauze meant to Jones, the effect of the music on a Western listener, and the implications behind the music itself. (I encourage everyone here to read it; it’s a fascinating character study and a beautiful, incisive piece of writing.) Richardson mentioned that his first and favorite Muslimgauze record (bought on a whim, as most Muslimgauze records have little to no identifying information on them) was Jaal ab Dullah, and I trust his recommendations, so I bought Jaal ab Dullah at Amoeba Music in Hollywood and gave it a spin.
Now. I’ve been listening to indie music since I was fairly young and have a propensity for the experimental, so I’ve heard a lot of weird shit. I’d never heard anything like Jaal ab Dullah. The music sounded like it was made entirely with live instrumentation and recorded onto old analog equipment (which it was-Jones never used computers, sequencers, or anything digital), without regard for typical song length, song structure, or volume levels-indeed, some of the sounds would move from barely audible to deafening in the blink of an eye. There was a kind of odd hip-hop influence running through the record-the beats bang and groove in bottom-heavy fashion-but it was combined with strange Arabic instrumentation that made me wonder if Jones had ever heard N.W.A or Public Enemy in his life. Jaal ab Dullah is loud, and the first few times I switched it on without remembering to turn the volume down made me jump out of my chair. This album was foreign, perversely seductive, and so startlingly violent in its execution that it made me wonder-with my experimental music fetish-how I’d ever managed to overlook it. It quickly became one of my favorite records.
As I spent some time with Jaal ab Dullah, I read about Muslimgauze in detail in order to get the full story. And boy, was there a story. First, let it be known that Bryn Jones is no longer with us; he died of a rare blood disease in early 1999. His career as Muslimgauze began in 1982 when Israel incited a military occupation of Lebanon, and Jones released three records that year as a reaction: Extended Play, Piano Room, and Triptych. Not only did Jones focus his career terrifyingly closely on the Middle East, he aligned himself ideologically with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and pretty much anything else in the Middle East that directly opposed the philosophies and actions of Israel and the United States. From 1982 until pretty much the day he died, he kept releasing records at breakneck speed-fifteen records in 1996, nine records in 1997 and an unfathomable sixteen records in 1998. There are now 192 official Muslimgauze CDs floating around in the world, and even more music in the vaults that has yet to be pressed. This guy was, um, pretty busy.
His beliefs didn’t show up explicitly in the music; put this stuff on and all you might think was that it was instrumental, kind of freaky and referenced both quick-n-dirty electronica and Arabic music. Instead, Jones got his point across through the packaging. A CD cover might contain a picture of an Arab leader, or a young Muslim girl holding a machine gun, or a sepia-toned scene of a desert (as appears on Jaal ab Dullah). The song and album titles are meant to provoke strong reactions from those who oppose his beliefs (The Rape of Palestine and Vote Hezbollah are both album titles, and one song on Izlamaphobia is called “Israeli Bullet Passing Through the Body of a Palestinian Child”). The booklet of one of the CDs I own, called Alms for Iraq, contains pictures of Iraqi children so bloodied and mutilated that news networks wouldn’t dare broadcast them. So Jones, with his unpopular beliefs, obsessive focus and the ridiculous amount of CDs he recorded, could correctly be called a fanatic. Yet to leave it at that would be missing the point of what makes Muslimgauze so strange, and so strangely alluring. Wasn’t this a white guy? From England? Who didn’t even practice the religion of the people with whom he felt solidarity? What’s going on here?
The “solidarity” he felt toward the Palestinians among others is thorny, and not what you might expect. It’s clear from looking at Jones’ titles, artwork, press releases, and interviews with fringe publications that his view on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is incredibly black-and-white. For Jones, there was simply no room for Israelis in Palestine and they had to leave. (Jones never explicitly referred to this, as far as I know, but I don’t think he’d be entirely opposed to the idea of using terrorism to drive the enemy out). He thought the U.S. and Israel were inherently evil and that their so-called oppression of Palestinians, Iraqis, and other Muslims was heartless and meant only to kill innocent people. Essentially, Muslimgauze is agitprop that doesn’t bother to examine both sides of the conflict, and many a reviewer has pointed this out. At the risk of stepping into “psychologist mode” (an especially sticky proposition considering that Jones has passed away), it may have been that Jones was driven more by his emotions than by politics. His albums seem to have been born from rage that comes with a controversial event, rather than the specifics of the event itself. (For example, Betrayal, another album I own, was recorded in 1993 mere days after the initial peace treaty between Israel and the PLO. The album cover depicts the fated handshake between Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in a sickening pink hue, and Jones must have felt this “Betrayal” so strongly that it replaced the release of another album set for the same date). Viewed in that way, it’s conceivable that Jones had picked the Middle Eastern conflict out of a hat filled with topical issues, and that he could have built up the same anger at other oppressors out there if he had set his sights on something different.
After all, Jones was a loner, oppressed by the world himself. He didn’t have friends, did few collaborations with other musicians and very rarely played live or granted interviews. He probably didn’t have much of a love life; the idea of him having sex with a woman is damn near preposterous. Most importantly, he didn’t convene with other Muslims and didn’t care at all what the Muslim community thought of his recordings. It was, then, a personal mission to turn his anger into as many compact discs in as little time as possible, as though by releasing sixteen albums in a year he could quell his feelings (even though it was clear that by 1999 his rage still burned; he recorded albums even around the time he died in January). Jones’ own status as a loner who didn’t care about other people’s opinions must have resonated in the outer limits of independent music listeners, and today, as it was when Jones was alive, Muslimgauze doesn’t attract Muslims or PLO supporters as much as it attracts fellow loners who could identify with Jones’ emotional turmoil.
The fact that Jones didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone but himself thought of his music meant that Muslimgauze was free to break just about every musical convention that existed. Songs might go on past the 10-minute mark, well after they’ve stopped developing, or they might last less than 30 seconds, but the standard-issue 3-to-4-minute song is a rarity in Muslimgauze’s catalogue. A track title and the music that accompanied it would often have nothing to do with each other; to reinforce that point, songs on the same album would have exactly the same title and be completely different songs (the two occurrences of “Shimmer, Then Disappear” on Jaal ab Dullah sound nothing alike), while the same music would appear on multiple tracks (Jaal ab Dullah’s “Benazir Bhutto’s Hands Are Clean” and “Bright Shadows” are essentially identical). A song on Jaal ab Dullah called “Ultra Orthodox and No Cheating” goes nearly eight minutes with barely a change of note, and then, in the last 20 seconds, one of Muslimgauze’s best beats jumps out of the speakers and tears right through you (factoid: that beat is now my ringtone). Some albums in his discography would sound to the untrained ear like mere repeats, such that you didn’t entirely need to own one if you owned another. That cheap, analog sound was practically anathema for musicians recording around the same time, as was the even cheaper packaging. And then, of course, there’s that unbelievable release schedule to consider, one that no musician with a healthy mind and more than a slight desire to make money would be able to pull off. Taking all of this into consideration, Muslimgauze can be approached as its own self-referential sound world, answerable only to itself, and be enjoyed purely on that level. Nothing sounds like this.
Yet Jones clearly wanted Muslimgauze to be more than just music, and if I started comparing him to other artists without regard to the entire Muslimgauze ethic, Jones would be rolling in his grave. The truth is, I can’t listen to a Muslimgauze record without thinking about the PLO, anti-U.S. sentiments, and the man who roiled behind the mixing board. As a Jewish American, I represent what Jones considered to be the face of evil. Turn the equation around and it becomes even worse: By listening to what Jones created, it’s as though he’s implicating me in his quest to rid the world of American and Israeli power. Not surprisingly, this can make me feel guilty; I’d never share my taste for Muslimgauze with my Jewish parents or even to very many of my friends. But his unpopular opinion makes me sympathize with him (after all, I’ve held many of my own unpopular opinions too), and I can identify with his feeling that he and his “people” were victimized. There’s something very indie rock about feeling as though you’re the little guy swimming upstream, which may explain why he reached a devoted grip of "normal music" listeners despite his anti-Semitic views, the limited quantities of his CDs that were printed, and the strangeness of the music itself. Moreover, with nearly 200 albums to his name, exploring Muslimgauze’s career has become a kind of collection process for me. I still remember which Muslimgauze CDs I bought in which order: Jaal ab Dullah was my first, followed by Lo-Fi India Abuse, then Syrinjia, then Alms for Iraq, then Betrayal, then Hummus, and Farouk Enjineer and Vote Hezbollah are both on the way. And though his music does repeat itself (with that many albums and no switches in the equipment utilized, it’s inevitable), small changes in approach become gigantic in context, and I feel as though I’m getting a fresh look at Muslimgauze with each release I buy. Jaal ab Dullah is perhaps most representative of Late Period Muslimgauze (earlier efforts were more ambient and less sonically violating) and probably the best executed, but I love all of my Muslimgauze albums and I wouldn’t give any of them up.
So far, I haven’t really made a connection between the music and all of the wrapping it comes in, but in fact, there is one, and it may be the single most crucial thing that makes Muslimgauze particularly scary. The anger that Bryn Jones felt toward the world came through not only in the diatribes he spit in interviews and the photos he chose to include in the booklets, but also in the music itself, however indirectly. Interestingly though, the rage never spills over into madness, instead maintaining a kind of stone-faced equanimity, as a cold-blooded killer might when hunting someone down. With all of the clanging and banging, the blasted technoid beats and the genuinely humorless melodies, the music bears an uncanny resemblance to that thing that Jones might not be opposed to if the need for it arose: terrorism. Muslimgauze may have been Jones’ way of fighting the forces of evil as a one-man army-the way a terrorist would-with furiousness streamlined into terrifying resolve. Those beats are so powerful and the noises so ugly that they make the listener a kind of victim, or perhaps an accomplice, depending on which side is taken. It sounds like a horrible way to spend your music listening life, but if you’re ever particularly angry at someone or something, it’s one of the best cathartic releases you could ever put to work.
So Muslimgauze is “more than just music,” though the music itself is wonderful, and of course, wholly unique. For an experimental music connoisseur, a library is incomplete without having at least Jaal ab Dullah sitting on the shelf. I can even picture those with a taste for hardcore rap and hardcore metal digging this stuff, if only for its loud volumes and unrelenting extremity. But I just can’t listen to Muslimgauze without thinking about Jones-how truly original he was in the music world, how much he would have hated my very being and yet how much I still love what he did, how huge and complicated the emotional requirements are when approaching anything in his catalogue. Mark Richardson mentioned in a review of Hamas Cinema Gaza Strip that Jones’ death in 1999 was evidence of a higher power. He meant that if Jones had seen everything going on today-far, far too much conflict to name here-he would have driven himself crazy. He’s probably right. For now, what we have is the portrait of a man who was more committed to his art than just about anyone I can name, and who made incredible, inimitable records as a result of that commitment.
Bryn Jones