10 years ago today, January 14, 1999, Bryn Jones, better known as the Muslimgauze during his lifetime, died of pneumonia at the age of 38. His legacy consists of nearly 100 albums and a work ethic and dedication that is second to none, but at the same time a political agenda that has always denied him greater notoriety during his lifetime. This feature is not only an obituary for the tenth anniversary of his death, but also an appreciation and introduction to an artist who polarized as well as fascinated during his career, and who in retrospect was obviously able to leave his mark on a lot of current electronic and dubstep producers.

A detailed biography by Bryn Jones is as difficult as it is superfluous. There are hardly more than a handful of pictures, the rare live shows he played in his almost 20-year career, as he found the sound in live venues disgraceful, can be summed up in a good dozen, and his life away from music was also very unspectacular. Born on June 17, 1961, Bryn Jones lived in Manchester all his life, judging by some sources ,until his death in the same room where he grew up. A loner during his lifetime, Jones was never interested in joining the booming Manchester music scene in the 70s and 80s, or even feeling a sense of belonging to a scene. Even in interviews, he always distanced himself from comparisons – Muslimgauze was its own, self-sufficient cosmos that opened up to only a few people. But even though Bryn Jones was a reclusive and reserved person, he was quite humorous in the eyes of his few acquaintances. The few people who met Bryn Jones in person were, apart from his family, rare collaborators, such as Bourbonese Qualk, on whose Recloose label his first productions were released, Bass Communion or Species of Fishes, as well as some of the label makers who supported Bryn Jones and the Muslimgauze project for a long time, especially Charles Powne of Soleilmoon from Portland and Geert-Jan Hobijn from the Dutch label Staalplaat , which provided most of the Muslimgauze releases, even if Bryn Jones didn't make it easy for them, and also failed with one or the other label. In interviews , Jones was always unflinching, delivering the same phrases over and over again, and never deviating from his line. To the question of why he never uses vocals, he replied in his stoic, almost childish way: "There are no vocals for two reasons: One is a lot of the music is ruined by bad lyrics badly sung... Most people in today's music cannot sing. Second is that I like to do everything and I can't sing, so I don't."

Bryn Jones was an almost obsessive musician. Over the course of his career, Bryn Jones has released an album every two months. He spent almost every day in the studio, almost ascetic and with meticulous fine-tuning and motivation, producing tens of thousands of tracks and remixing them, sifting them together until an album was finished, which he sent to his record labels, often badly or unmastered. Several of the same tracks appear on different releases, often the same tracks with minimal differences but the same title, there are numerous faulty and misnamed tracks, in short: it is an opaque jungle of DATs, CDs and cassettes – Bryn Jones never worked with computers – from the depths of which new albums still emerge. And yet Bryn Jones always seemed to have a master plan in mind, each album embodying its own message, which almost always had its origins on a political level.

„EVERY PIECE OF MUSLIMGAUZE MUSIC STARTS WITH A POLITICAL FACT, A HISTORY, A PICTURE“

Because to describe Muslimgauze without the driving political message behind it would be as impossible as it would be fatal. It was in 1982, while Bryn Jones was still studying art at the University of Manchester, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon. It's unclear why this event of all events would have such an impact on him, but there's no question that he had the idea of making music at all at that moment. Initially operating under the name E.g Oblique Graph, less than a year later, in 1983, the chronology of Muslimgauze officially began, a project that from then on already had its message in its name. Muslimgauze, although always only the solo project of Bryn Jones, was always addressed by him in the plural. From then on, Muslimgauze was not just a mere synonym, but rather an ideal concept, dedicated to the people of Palestine, Arabs and Muslims who suffered from oppression and persecution not only in the Middle East, but worldwide. It seems absurd that an inconspicuous loner from Manchester, of all people, should become one of the biggest supporters of Palestine, Hamas and the P.L.O. on a musical level, but every album, every track by Muslimgauze arose from a political-historical event, was linked to a very specific, albeit abstract idea. Muslimgauze was a supporter of Yasser Arafat and al-Gaddafi for a long time, and he criticized both Israel and the Zionists, as well as the latter's relations with the Western powers, first and foremost the United States. These views were so strong that he refused to use equipment from the USA. But he was perhaps less pro-Muslim than anti-oppression; throughout his career, he repeatedly showed himself to be a supporter of other oppressed peoples and organizations, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the Buddhists in Tibet, and it was not only the West that he criticized: he also condemned the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Chechnya.

The music, as mentioned, is almost exclusively instrumental, with the exception of a few Arabic chants, small news fragments and fragmented radio broadcasts. The political message, on the other hand, becomes all the clearer when you look at the album and song names as well as the artwork. An often-quoted cover shows the handshake of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin during the Oslo peace process, above which is the title: Betrayal. Treachery. Other albums refer to historical events such as the Hebron Massacre of 1929, others are dedicated to people, such as Abu Nidal or In Search of Ahmad Shah Masood. Still others have a clearer message ready: Vote Hezbollah is the name of one album, another Izlamaphobia and The Rape of Palestine, another Return of Black September, in reference to the terrorist group that was responsible for the Olympic massacre in Munich.

The covers often feature images of soldiers, wounded children and fighting women, burning oil fields, mosques and Arabic letters, mujahideen swearing by the Koran, and religious allusions. Each album is equipped with numerous images and liner notes, many of them dedicated to the P.L.O. or the people of Palestine, and the track titles are also often based on places or events that can be traced back to the Middle East.

The borderline and sometimes very polemical political views of Muslimgauze certainly did not help him with his album sales. In many countries, Muslimgauze's albums are still on the index, and in some European countries, record stores that carry his albums have also been attacked. "His" labels such as Staalplaat, Extreme and Soleilmoon, which were responsible for a large part of the artwork, were often criticized. And yet: he achieved most of his sales in the country that he perhaps despised most besides Israel: the USA, which seems almost ironic, especially in view of the developments of the last ten years. Even today, the reception is divided. At best, it is astonishing that an artist so few know polarizes in such a strong way, but it only fuels the myth that Bryn Jones certainly never wanted to achieve in his time.

If you didn't know the origin, you would probably consider Muslimgauze's albums to be extremist material. But to think of Muslimgauze as a potential terrorist or religious fanatic is certainly an exaggeration. Bryn Jones never converted to Islam, and he never visited the Middle East or Palestine. His simple reasoning: "I don't think you can visit an occupied land. It's the principle. Not until it's free again. Muslimgauze have not and will not impose themselves on any country in the Middle East. A short visit as a tourist does not improve things."

"I HAVE NO INTEREST IN OTHER PEOPLES OUTPUT. MY TIME IS TOTALLY MUSLIMGAUZE, NEW TRACKS, NEW CDS, OLD TRACKS, IT'S ENDLESS"

Perhaps the most important thing, however, is and remains the music. Muslimgauze has produced almost 100 albums in almost 17 years, which are meticulously compiled by some fans, plus more than a dozen albums released from his estate, as well as countless new pressings in the last ten years, so that his catalog has now reached a good 200 releases. No wonder, as a large part of the albums were only released month after month via the "Subscription Series" in an extremely limited edition of 500 copies. Of course, with this sheer mass of music, it is not surprising that the quality is sometimes subject to strong fluctuations. While the first albums were released completely unmastered (it was not until 1990 that the first professionally mastered album was released with Intifaxa), the music in general is often characterized by a certain lo-fi character. What was initially a by-product of classic tape noise and permanent overdubbing was also used as a stylistic device in later times, as the sound became more polished and present, and so many recordings contain a hiss, crackle and crackle, which is partly due to the quality of the source material, which Jones processed analogue over and over again, is also partly deliberate distortion, even though Jones was definitely a lover of sound, packing frequencies into some recordings that can only be heard on high-end equipment. Despite everything, he always remained true to his analog hardware, because only this allowed him to have his own sound, as he told in another interview: "I use old equipment in a rough way. You use the same equipment as all the other; you all sound the same. Good luck with you. I don't want to sound like all the others."

But if it doesn't sound like all the others, what does this project actually sound like?

At the beginning of his career, especially on the first releases as E.g. Oblique Graph, Muslimgauze still concentrated on the synthesizer-heavy sound of the New Wave Movement of the time, overdubbed with short vocal samples from the radio or television, and backed with plenty of filters and delay, as the following example from 1984 shows.

Under The Hand of Jaruzelski (Hunting Out With an Aerial Eye, 1984)

Soon, however, more and more elements of Arabic music were added, especially the drums, which were soon to be part of Muslimgauze's archetypal sound and standard repertoire. Perhaps the largest part of Muslimgauze music therefore also consists of polyrhythmic drum sequences, which of course have their origins primarily in the music of the Middle East, but were also strongly influenced by the ethno sounds of India or Africa. Electronic drum machines as well as traditional, self-recorded percussion (Jones was a trained percussionist himself) and various drum kits can be found on almost every album, as well as more unusual sound elements, such as the clatter of pots or field recordings used as rhythm elements, not unlike the current way of working of Matmos or Matthew Herbert.

Medina Flight (Narcotic, 1997)

But in addition to the more percussive music, Muslimgauze also had another side, which would probably be classified under "Dub" today, but at that time it was still called "Ambient" or "Desert Ambience". Entire albums have been created from this sound, which either consisted of completely beatless field recordings and repeatedly modified synths and pads, not unlike the ambient productions of a Biosphere e.g. ...

Azzazin #2 (Azzazin, 1995)

… or combined deep, dubby basses with elongated, clanging synthesizer sounds and filters. The drums are pushed into the background as accentuated, while short vocal fragments break through again and again, the distant clatter of the hustle and bustle of an oriental bazaar, which creates an incredibly dense and hypnotic atmosphere, which, spoken in pictures, seems to move slowly, but always a bit menacingly over the wide, shimmering dunes in the sunshine, as the following track proves almost perfectly.

Mullah Said (1998)

Especially when you look at the success of Shackleton or Appleblim today, who build their music around a very similar, deeply structured aesthetic, the question remains whether they were familiar with the music of Muslimgauze. If you listen to the following piece, you can certainly see parallels, in terms of programming and the complexity of the drums, as well as the well-placed pauses – and that, mind you, a good 15 years earlier.

Izzat (Intifaxa, 1990)

From the mid-90s onwards, Muslimgauze's sound became increasingly rugged and aggressive, the tracks shorter, the percussion staccato like the firing of a rifle volley, and distortion was increasingly used as a central element. It was perhaps also the displeasure of Muslim Gauze about the conflicts in the Middle East, which were occurring at ever shorter intervals, that produced this turnaround. As I said before: every album is a reaction to an event, and has a very specific sound that Muslimgauze assigns to it. This is not always recognizable to the listener, but what has accumulated in the midst of the whole crowd over the years is a variety of ideas, a mixture of different rhythms and influences, production techniques and styles. Over the years, Muslimgauze has produced head-nodding hip-hop instrumentals as well as choppy IDM compositions and nervous breakbeat escapades reminiscent of the early Aphex Twin and later Venetian Snares productions...

Mustafas Cassette Market Marrakesh (Fedayeen, 2000)

… as well as complex, melodious and quite danceable, percussive ethno tracks:

Satsooma (Silk & Dogs, 1999)

It's hard to find the right introduction to this overwhelming number, only a few albums, like Narcotic from 1997, give a small insight into the diversity of the sound, but to be able to experience the whole palette between noise and ambient, complex percussion and alienated world music, you also need the courage to dive a little deeper. It's not always a nice listening experience, it's sometimes exhausting and tiring, many tracks sound too similar, but the feeling is all the nicer when you're rewarded again and again by small highlights that abound – you just have to find them. Annibale Picicci summed up his personal attitude to music and the Muslimgauze as a person quite well, and also shares my personal experiences: "I became aware of the incredible varieties of his music in style, mood and its sometimes strong and sometimes very tender emotional power that inevitably evolved while listening. And yet, every single second it was undeniably his sound. Slowly I understood that his music was his language in the most direct sense, his most genuine expression he had, that his music was him and he was his music. Having understood this, I can say, as long as I will listen to his sound, he'll be alive to me – and as long as I live I will always find some bits of his music that I haven't heard yet, that's for sure."

Although or precisely because his music was mostly known only in insider circles, Muslimgauze had to deal with prejudices until his death. He has been called an extremist, a fanatic who finances the PLO from his meagre album sales. An anti-Semite because he denied the existence of Israel. A disillusioned nutcase who was far from reality. Everyone is free to form their own judgement about Muslim Gauze, to share, despise, or at least critically question their political views. But even if music and idea seem to be so inseparably linked, it is ultimately above all the music that persists the myth, and which can also inspire a completely unbiased listener, precisely because it works far away from any political sphere. Last but not least, Muslimgauze was not someone who wanted to impose his views on anyone. Even though his music always arose from a political impulse, Muslimgauze never intended to see it as a premise for listening to his CDs. In his own words, he put it in a nutshell: "Music is open to all. Muslimgauze are the last group to take advice from. 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."

10 years ago today, Bryn Jones died and with him one of the most ambitious projects in electronic music. The conflict in the Middle East and Palestine continues.

Article by Eikman
This article originally appeared on The Last Beat (January 14, 2009)
Translated with the assitance of Bing Translate.