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Muslimgauze

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Muslimgauze, “Mullah Said” (Staalplaat, 1998/2018)

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Earlier this year, Staalplaat took a break from their plunge into Bryn Jones’ seemingly endless archive of unreleased/hyper-limited material to put out a double-LP vinyl reissue of this beloved landmark album from 1998. While the vinyl format is an odd choice for this particular release (I have the digital version), I am delighted by this new reissue campaign: the sprawling Muslimgauze discography is a hopelessly intimidating and overwhelming labyrinth for all but the most die-hard fans, so the world definitely needs a knowledgeable curator to call attention to the most timeless and essential releases in the Muslimgauze canon. This is one of those. Normally, my own favorite Muslimgauze albums tend to be the more ethno-percussion-driven ones, but Mullah Said‘s heady drone/dub-inspired collage aesthetic is a striking exception, as it stands as one of Jones’ most immersive, evocative, and fully formed works.

One thread that runs endlessly through the Muslimgauze discography is Bryn Jones’ obsessive recycling and self-cannibalization, as the same motifs appear again and again and many of his better ideas resulted in multiple variations of the same song. That curious approach arguably reached its apotheosis with this album, as two of its lengthiest songs (“Every Grain of Palestinian Sand” and “Muslims Die India”) appear twice, accounting for roughly 18 minutes of a 65-minute album—and those two pieces can only be differentiated by their subtly different bass patterns and shifts in pace. And the opening “Mullah Said” does not sound much different either. It is unusual sequencing, to be sure, but it does not feel redundant, lazy, or one-dimensional.

Rather, Mullah Said feels like a single, massive, trance-inducing epic with relatively irrelevant differentiations between its various movements. As such, the vinyl format fundamentally disrupts Mullah Said‘s raison d’être: the mesmerizing cumulative power of the album’s enveloping, hallucinatory repetition. I imagine it is quite hard to remain beguiled by Mullah Said‘s exotic and unworldly spell when you have to flip a record three times to get to the end, though I suppose roughly the same effect could be achieved by just playing the same side of the album four times in a row. That is not a negative statement about the music itself, mind you—just an observation that Mullah does not have a dramatic arc that gradually unfolds: it is more like a swirling and mysterious aural hallucination to live inside. Concepts like “beginning” and “end” do not hold much meaning here. That said, people love vinyl, so I cannot fault Staalplaat for their choice: a deluxe vinyl reissue is an event that generates excitement—a reissued CD is not.

In essence, Mullah Said is built upon an understated (yet perfect) infinite groove of brooding bass tones and shifting electronic drum patterns. Aside from the tensely relentless kick drum pulse in the first “Every Grain of Palestinian Sand,” Jones tends to maintain a languorously lurching dub-like pulse, which provides an optimally spacious canvas for all of the other dub-like flourishes (drifting voices, echoing percussion, etc.). There are occasional loops of sitar/tambura melodies and some wonderfully menacing swells of buzzing string drones that serve as recurring motifs to give the album a sense of structure, yet the true beauty of Mullah Said lies in everything on the periphery: this album is a vibrant, multilayered, and complex tour de force of clattering hand percussion, evocative field recordings, and enigmatic snatches of dialogue.

In the past, I have critiqued Muslimgauze for Jones’ exasperating tendency to endlessly move on to the next project without lingering around to fully flesh out his best ideas and Mullah Said is an unexpectedly dramatic swing in the opposite direction: it is basically just a simple bassline and sinister-sounding sitar buzz painstakingly expanded into an incredibly rich and detailed fantasia. It feels like I was dropped inside a nightmare set in an unknown Middle Eastern city and all I know is that something extremely significant just happened, but trying to piece together exactly what proves to be incredibly elusive. I am completely enveloped in an unnerving chaos of gunshots, lamentations, prayers, radio transmissions, shouting men, speeding trucks, conspiratorial-sounding conversations, and a host of unrecognizable and unfamiliar other sounds. Sometimes it feels like I am just wandering through a marketplace and other times it feels like I just stumbled into the aftermath of a massacre, which is a very neat trick indeed: Mullah is built on endlessly shifting sands and its unstoppable forward motion makes it impossible to ever fully get my bearings. Despite that seemingly amorphous structure, however, Jones maintains a deliciously constant balancing act of tension and release, as these pieces regularly blossom into small-scale crescendos of intensity or oases of comparative calm (or at least simmering unease rather than boiling unease).

As swirling, lysergic, and ambiguously malevolent as it is, however, Mullah Said is curiously bookended by glimpses of simple beauty: it opens on a somewhat meditative tone with a call to prayer and closes in extremely bizarre and disarming fashion with “The End.” The crux of “The End” is just a woman quietly singing a pretty song to herself, seemingly surrounded by a gibbering chorus of birds. Left unmolested, it would be a perfectly lovely and hopeful coda for Mullah Said‘s darkly heavy and hallucinatory journey, but Jones repeatedly disrupts it with a strange percussion loop that sounds weirdly arbitrary. Or perhaps the disruptive loop deliberately serves to show that bliss and tranquility are but a flickering mirage.

Whether it was meant as a powerful final commentary or just a somewhat half-baked collision of studio scraps that perversely felt right, I will never know. Bryn Jones was a complicated man and I would probably go insane if I ever tried to nail down his intentions. In any case, despite Jones never having been to the Middle East, Mullah Said paints an extremely vivid picture of the region as it existed in his head, distilling all of its rage, turmoil, and beauty into a deeply compelling and haunting aural postcard from an imaginary city. Mullah Said is not just one of Muslimgauze’s finest albums—it is one of the most radical and inventive “outsider” albums to ever emerge from the dub tradition.

Listen here.

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Muslimgauze, “Zilver/Feel The Hiss” (Staalplaat, 2015)

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I had been doing an excellent job of ignoring the constant trickle of unnecessary Muslimgauze vault scrapings for the last few years, but the surprising amount of excitement surrounding this one enticed me into grudgingly giving it a chance. I am glad I did, as Feel The Hiss‘s mingling of heavy dub and sound collage is probably my favorite of Bryn Jones’ myriad stylistic threads. The album still falls prey to the usual “Muslimgauze vault” curse of sounding like endless slight variations of the same goddamn song, but in this case the song being endlessly replicated is actually good enough to warrant it. This is the best Muslimgauze album to surface in a long time.

Feel The Hiss is a rather unique entry in Staalplaat’s ongoing vault-clearing/reissue campaign, as it is basically a complete album that Jones never got a chance to put the finishing touches on. He recorded these nine pieces live to tape, labeled it “Zilver tracks,” then never revisited them. Unexpectedly, that “unfinished” aspect is one Hiss‘s biggest selling points, as these pieces have a raw immediacy that would probably have been smoothed over if Jones had gone through his normal production regimen. 

Also, the degree of unfinishedness is quite a lucky one, as Hiss does not feel particularly lo-fi, nor does it feel like anything is missing. Instead, everything just feels a lot sharper and crisper than it normally would, particularly the many prominent snatches of dialogue and field recordings strewn all over the album. I suspect that a “finished” version would have pushed the sound collage elements much deeper in the mix and punched up the bass, if other Muslimgauze albums are any indication. I suppose that would be cool too, but less so: I am very much a fan of this “garage rock” version of Jones’ artistry.

While there are ostensibly nine (untitled) pieces comprising Hiss, there are actually only three distinct and significant ones due to the distinctly Jones-ian repetition of the core music, though they are thankfully all long enough to carry the album. There is not a hell of a lot distinguishing the three variations from one another in a concrete sense, as all are basically built upon an unchanging bass line and a slow dub-reggae pulse embellished with a buzzing tanpura drone and an occasional kanun loop (Jones kept the music fairly minimal and laid-back with this one). Despite the extreme similarities, however, the minor differences between the bass lines and the tempos still provide each of the three discrete pieces with their own individual feel.

The best of batch is probably “Zilver One,” as it boasts the most tense and propulsive rhythm. That kind of makes all the difference with this material, as the field recordings and dialogue in the foreground are always a chaotic and mysterious collage of angry voices, non-angry voices, prayers, singing, interviews with snipers, sudden crashes, pouring water, clattering metal, monkeys, birds, trains, and whatever the fuck else Bryn felt like piling on. It is all very compelling and deliciously disorienting and evocative, but it is also very abstract, unmelodic, and occasionally harsh, so it works best when bolstered by an appropriately strong and hypnotic groove. “Zilver One” hits that mark most successfully.

“Zilver Two” and “Zilver Eight” combine to constitute another distinct piece, differing primarily from the first piece by being significantly slower. While that sacrifices some momentum, the trade-off is an appealing one, as it leaves more space and shifts the focus more strongly to Jones’ hallucinatory web of overlapping voices and street sounds. 

The third distinct piece is kind of a trilogy, as songs four through six essentially blur together into a single work that stretches for nearly 20 minutes. Again, this one is slowed down to a druggy reggae crawl, which again allows Bryn to make the most of his arsenal of voices, which in this case includes a lot of snatches of devotional singing that overlap and pan around pleasingly. The best part, however, comes in the latter half, as Jones allows an ominously quavering drone to take center stage to mesmerizing effect (which, of course, makes the occasional bursts of shouting, crashing, and door-pounding seem even more meaningful and startling).

I suppose the sole real flaw with Feel The Hiss is that the remaining three pieces legitimately do feel unfinished, particularly “Zilver Three,” which is little more than a beat and would have me hurling some serious “shameless Vatican Shadow rip-off” accusations had it not been recorded back in 1995. On the bright side, it is only two minutes long and serves as a palette cleanser of sorts before the next substantial piece. 

The other two non-songs are even shorter, but range from a recording of wind chimes (“Zilver Seven”) to an apparent studio experiment where Bryn just messed around with echoing tablas and blasts of white noise until he lost interest (“Zilver Nine”). The rest of the album is great though and quite singular within the vast Muslimgauze discography (I have seen comparisons to the busier, more industrial Minaret Speaker album, but that album has a very different feel). Feel The Hiss is as close to a straight-up dub album as anyone could hope for from Jones: spacious, uncluttered, unhurried, and swirling with an immersive world of curious sounds and snatches of dialogue.

Also, I do not think any sane person ever expects a perfect Muslimgauze album, as Bryn was by nature too restless and self-cannibalizing to dwell on a batch of songs long enough to make that happen. Jones did not make as many albums as he did by worrying about sequencing or about putting his best foot forward at all times—he did it by tirelessly and obsessively moving forward to keep up with his endless flow of ideas. Some albums captured him on a particularly inspired streak and some did not. Feel The Hiss is most definitely one of the former.

Listen here.