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Listening to Muslimgauze in 2023: five thoughts and a mix
Muslimgauze is back on the feed again, and this time, I felt compelled to gather some thoughts on aspects of the project and its longevity that have nagged me for many years, that I still haven’t really seen discussed elsewhere. For a good read on the author’s life and politics, see Jace Clayton’s “Muslin Gaze,” from 2007[1]; still the last word in that department.
I also prepared an accompanying mix you can hear on youtube or mixcloud.
1. Context collapses around Muslimgauze
In 2001, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan created an “ideal” background for “discovering” Muslimgauze, just as the Palestinian occupation becoming a war in 2023 does today. Absent these hideous contexts, and the concomitant feelings of pathetic powerlessness in the presence of enormous global injustice, I imagine many people checking Muslimgauze out for the first time would dismiss the project as unpalatably corny and politically dumb, if not worse. In the presence of this context, however, Muslimgauze feeds and/or feeds on a current. It dials into raw objection, without subtlety or complexity, in a way that readily becomes consumable; no more subtle than Banksy, Obey, or the Dead Kennedys, but about two or three obscurity tiers deeper (at about the level of Les Rallizes Denudes). The music itself is occasionally incredible but largely unfiltered, and heavily, uhh… veiled… by unrelated mythologizing.
I found my way to Muslimgauze via his inexplicable Luke Vibert remix coming up on kazaa in my first days of high-speed internet, in my dorm room, two weeks before September 11th; fertile ground. At about this time, Muslimgauze was beginning to proliferate via the “high filesharing” era. I don’t believe the project at all anticipated being available in its approximate entirety at once to any listener in the infinite library as “music,” or that “the oeuvre” could have been a seriously-considered aspect of the project. Rather, during his life, its author (Bryn Jones) appeared to be interested in access to his work being effortful, physical, and limited.
That’s not been my experience, though. Mine reflects the then-emergent, now-dominating context that his project (i.e. almost every project) now exists in: as disembodied recordings on the internet that can be readily listened-across without any investment. From 2001 thru 2004 I used yousendit and rapidshare-driven access from a message board to listen through a large slice of this discography at once. This accessibility shift warps the project: what had been a small, esoteric, limited, personal, hand-to-hand thing became a sprawling institution, aimed at archiving work that appeared to have mostly expected to be ephemeral.[2]
2. The new flesh of Muslimgauze
Muslimgauze still collects devotees in part because Jones has been dead while still releasing “new” music for 25 years. There’s a necro-prophetic death-cult quality that has arisen around the project through this - a Videodrome / Brian O'Blivion “new flesh” thing that challenges attempts to talk about or assess the project in terms other than those of its own growing mythology. In any comments section (discogs, youtube), listeners refer to Muslimgauze mainly by its author’s name, as if between insiders it was a secret password. Muslimgauze keeps going beyond death: Somehow pure (or somehow purifying?) in its single-minded “dedication,” and somehow also “prophetic” in a smeared, Cassandra-like sense related to the simple, brutal reality of the continuing occupation of Palestine. It’s my view that Muslimgauze’s longevity is owed in large part to the force this myth provides, and that it works as a substitute for the lost esoteric from-the-hand umami the project had in its original form.
What to make of it then, in lieu of a real authorial presence, or real new contemporary work? I think of this Oneohtrix Point Never quote from 2010[3]:
[in the noise scene] one of my pet peeves was shitty noise bands that take up the whole merch table with 40 of their shithouse tape releases. [...] Noise dudes don't like to admit it, but they're basically like used-car salesmen because they'll appeal to their fans in these weird ways-- they'll be like, "We made this tape while we were tripping on acid for 12 hours in the desert." And, to me, that sounds like a used-car salesman being like, "Let's talk about my family life 'cause it's so similar to yours." It's ultra capitalist and weird.
“Muslimgauze has been speaking from beyond the grave for almost 25 years!”
“He was so dedicated to his vision that he mailed DAT tapes of new music to his labels as often as weekly!”
True that he did a lot of jamming that’s been made into a lot of records over time... but what’s served here, in the end, other than product? Does "yet more stuff" really constitute a vision, let alone one from beyond the grave?
And what can this “vision” be said to be exactly, especially since becoming decoupled from the obscure, limited, physical releases that really were part of the living artist’s vision, in the context he controlled? What’s being fetishized or valorized exactly in the continuing stream here? Is it simply productivity? The myth of a man whose anger could be so incandescent, that its heat could continue to be felt long after his death? The idea of a powerless individual objection to tragedy and war existing out-of-time, as an enterable soundscape, evoking the “timeless” “continuing reality” “on the ground” “over there”?
As a music listener I don’t really think it’s any of this, or that any of this is real; it’s all product fodder. Jones’s death, rather than lend any sublime or righteous character to his work, creates dressing for it, even cover. More of it does not make it any more what it already is, let alone something else.
3. Designing Muslimgauze
There’s no legible political quality to any of the music itself, but then, here come the images. They mirror the music’s tactics, deploying pastiche and sampling to create “vibes,” applying appropriated and cut-up “middle-eastern” signifiers as a filter. Like the tracks, this most often results in repetition and meaningless flattening, but with occasional successes.
My favorite is Gun Aramaic (1996), which places a calligraphic type design over an image of what looks to me like a video still or dream of desolate nighttime desert surveillance footage, evoking analogue tv news title cards to disorienting effect. The record covers are the first place I saw Thomas Dworzak's found illegal Taliban portraits[4], and the first place I saw Shirin Neshat's work anywhere[5].
There’s a major disconnect between the map and the territory, regarding Muslimgauze’s music and how it travels in the physical world. Jace Clayton: “to hear Muslimgauze, we must not listen to Bryn Jones. Nor pay much attention to his cover art.” Agree, and feel that this works in both directions; the design should be considered on its own terms as well. Given Jones’s recording schedule, it's difficult to imagine the depth of his involvement in this aspect of the project during his lifetime, and needless to say, he certainly hasn’t had any input on it since his death. Rather, it’s essentially been imposed onto his music by any number of external designers and label people. Clayton cites the cover images of the No Human Rights for Arabs in Israel reissue from 2004:
> [The] LP released during Jones’s lifetime came wrapped in a wonderfully understated sleeve made from handmade paper. Titles were impressed into the paper. The two posthumous versions by Staalplaat display a color photograph of a bloodied boy in bandages, one eye swollen shut. The image is photojournalism, a real artifact of the Arab-Israeli conflict. [...] One commentator on the music networking site Last.fm advises newcomers to “get past the ridiculously fundamentalist/trollish titles of his tracks and albums as they bear no relation to the music at all.”
This last.fm commentor’s critique extends directly into the design space too. In my view the primary aim of the packaging since Jones’s death has been to reinforce and serve the project’s death-cult quality, certainly not any other real “agenda,” or even necessarily the music. It’s this death-cult quality that now provides the only true, tangible context for the project as the institution it has become: the music, titling, and design fail to cohere together around anything legible or tangible, other than the raw facts of Jones’s prolific output and death.
Muslimgauze accelerated toward “Muslimgauze” as a design idea, and over time, a winning “institutional Muslimgauze aesthetic” evolved. It includes the “Muslimgauze” logo (presumably in Jones’s hand); Persian calligraphy marks warped into English characters; decoration meant to evoke patterns from Islamic architecture and tilework; black and white/dour/"super serious" art direction. Over time these are accompanied by increasingly literal imagery and posthumous titling. These all seem aimed (intentionally or not) at giving reissues and new releases alike the quality of a monument to a vision, when in fact that “vision” is still being actively constructed. Is this the best and most appropriate presentation for music that was likely recorded and shipped immediately, and likely considered ephemeral (not monumental) by its author?
I'd read interviews or reporting about the Muslimgauze design legacy as told by the designers responsible for it. What do these contributors make of Muslimgauze at this point, or their contributions to the project’s institutional and mythological qualities? I would assume for the most part, many of these people remain alive, and can in fact still speak to it, if anyone cares to try to put this together.
4. Manufacturing Muslimgauze
To summarize the ideas above: Muslimgauze has become “an institution” moreso than “a band” via his death and the internet; his work was never meant to be considered as an oeuvre, was not intended to be accessible or archival; the stylization of his politics have always been toward product outcomes, not toward any type of organization around any type of salient political position or action; the Muslimgauze legacy lies in large part beyond Jones, with the designers who built it.
The endpoint of all of this is the appropriation of Muslimgauze to create what is seen today as “new” “Muslimgauze.” Raw material is remixed as product into forms so distorted from their original shapes, that they mirror Muslimgauze’s own remix outcomes themselves. As an example, take the absolutely psycho release notes “the Muslimgauze Preservation Society” provided for their 2011 release, “Fuck Israel,” via Forced Exposure[6]:
> When Jones first met The Rootsman in 1996, several Rootsman albums were passed along by way of musical introduction. Jones promptly responded with several remixes on DAT, his way of saying 'hello', the posthumously titled Fuck Israel being among them. [...] Fuck Israel is a cry of anger against the illegal occupation of Palestine and the ongoing economic, political, and social subjugation of Palestinians by the Israelis. [...] Packaged with papyrus covers, hand printed in Egypt, with a 9 panel fold-open poster, CD set in a super jewel case and bonus sticker."[7]
So, what we have here is a tape Jones traded to a fellow musician in 1996, to “say hello.” It’s difficult to imagine that this was intended for release at all - let alone with posthumous titling, arrangement, a declaration of meaning imposed with maximum grandiosity, and tons of luxurious packaging - even “hand printed in Egypt”! All of this is very legibly “Muslimgauze,” but none of it is Muslimgauze; it’s just a really wild extrusion of product, taking the license Clayton notes quoted above to the absolute extreme.
5. Listening to Muslimgauze
I can think of many similarly-positioned esoteric underground artists with oeuvres that are much smaller and much harder to summarize than Muslimgauze’s. By comparison, you can hear the three or so flavors of Muslimgauze's "soundscapes," plus selections of his dubs, loops, and drums, and pretty much grok the whole project, despite there being so much material. New releases continue to present more and more stuff from the same distinct but few production periods and studio setups; it's certainly not Jandek-like new production or evolution.
Across releases there are clear repetitions - roughly or strictly identical tracks, edits, or ideas pushed out under the same and different names. I don’t know if this is a result of Jones’s own speedy relationship to his own production process, or if he knew he was doing this but figured all the releases were so limited it didn’t matter. Intuitively I doubt whether he maintained an organized archive of his own recordings, or even a collection of his own releases, but don’t know.
Okay, so, despite so much stuff about and surrounding this project being so ridiculous, let me finally say... there’s good music in there! Googling “best Muslimgauze records” will get you listening to the big early ambient ones, the big computer music one, and so on; see Optimo’s list[8]. However, my approach to Muslimgauze, given a long list of downloaded mp3s sitting flatly next to each other in itunes, has always been to just listen widely and then stick to replaying the tracks I like. Included here is a mix that isn’t an attempt to summarize, provide anything authoritative or complete, posit a “canon,” or make sense of this discography - I’m not interested in any of these things. Rather, I’m merely presenting a selection of ones I like that have stayed with me, that connect back to my listening more broadly. I situate this mix within that broader love of music, not as a tribute to anyone or anything more specific than that. Links again: youtube or mixcloud.
Footnotes
[1] Jace Clayton on the Muslimgauze legacy
[2] In 2004 I visited the Staalplaat store in Berlin on something of a pilgrimage (and bought unrelated records); it strikes me that this weirdly presages the way platforms would become realer than the things on them more broadly in the coming years. I’d assume anyone checking out Muslimgauze today is doing so on platforms like youtube or bandcamp. DJ Sprinkles’ writing about context collapse around “minor” and underground works is very much felt around all of this.
[3] Opn interview
[4] Dworzak’s taliban images
[5] It’s difficult to imagine that someone hasn’t brought this to Neshat’s attention (e.g., at this group show she was in with Hassan Khan’s video work titled “Muslimgauze RIP” ), I wonder what she makes of it. Mg userd her "Women of Allah" series, at least one image of which is now in the Smithsonian's collection. For more on Muslimgauze source images, a fan website catalogues some attributions here.
[6] "Muslimgauze Preservation Society" at Forced Exposure
[7] I have to add too that this release also says:
> On Fuck Israel, Muslimgauze muscles through a dubstep club, knocking-over hipster trendies in the process.
To which, lol, jeez, woof 🤮
[8] Emotional Rescue / Optimo on muslimgauze
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