Muslimgauze
Ali Zarin

Let's talk about someone named Bryn Jones, like the misspelled names of major brands found at markets. Bryn Jones.
It almost sounds like a joke, the nickname of a crack generator, the fake Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, the typo of a twenty-year-old music blogger dealing with an avoidable biography on the Rolling Stones.

However, Bryn Jones existed. His earthly passage, lasting 37 years, did not leave the imprint of a myth as his near-namesake did, but he can boast an immense production, in the numerical sense of the word.
Speaking of other records, six folders would not be enough to write his discography. Every curse that occurred in the Middle East powder keg became the name of one of his albums. Album.
Tapes, DAT, dirtiness, CDs, overdubs, old tools, obsession, quarter-tone singing, and news from an Arabic news channel, in the Manchester of alienating clubs set in the bland British city, where one could spiral between the odd and apathetic beats of Muslimgauze.
The return of Black September, Abu Nibal, Azzazin (one of the coolest artworks ever), Fatah Guerrilla, Mullah Said, Vote Hezbollah. And so on, until and beyond the end.
Ali Zarin is indeed a posthumous work, pressed on vinyl, which I wanted to purchase.
A prize, let's put it that way, for one of the most psychopathic careers in all music history.
OLP, Palestine, anti-Americanism, in the rich and gray Manchester of conservative Thatcher and Major, in the shadow of the Union Jack, the homeland of the Balfour Declaration.

But Ali Zarin, at least in its name, seems unrelated to events linked to the difficult Middle Eastern reality. It might be a dramatic tribute. A reference to alizarin: a toxic organic compound whose color resembles plasma. Muslimgauze, in fact, died due to a rare blood disease.
The album's content, difficult to place in a timeline, was found in the archives and recorded with too much care that didn’t have time to be “neglected” by the direct person involved.
The “suite” Ali Zarin, divided into three parts, is a hypnotic torment of 45 minutes: a loop machine that accelerates, decelerates, transforms within its minimal constraints, releasing songs and words of a battered world. Words that seem to emerge, like ghost-zombies, from that psychotic sound disturbance, ready to be sucked in and disappear into non-sonic space.
Not one of Muslimgauze's most unbearable works but, certainly, less distinctive compared to other projects curated in life. To close, a series of avoidable unnamed demo tapes. Like avoidable, in some aspects, his whole musical career might be. As inevitable, in the magical game of schizophrenia, is the result of an artist who perhaps had learned much but who, as a true deranged person, left no trace, except in the minds of those who seek in art, beyond the subjective and objective, something that might recall a kind of aesthetic empathy.

Bryn Jones learned from the industrial and up to this point, it would be easy. But he also learned from the early Steve Reich, the one who in his “Come out” played at creating phasing obsessions, incorporating social commitment. A social commitment that accompanied him throughout his career, with tributes to the trains of the deported (Different Trains) or the more recent WTC 9/11.
A gaze from ever-changing perspectives, his figure, adorably cunning, enough to earn him Pullitzers, respects, and necklaces: the only one among the “minimalists” to have received applause and praises from the clique of wrinkly academic love.

Muslimgauze definitely also learned from Canaxis by Holger Czukay, from My life in the bush of ghosts by Byrne and Eno. He learned and forgot, everything and quickly. Because his urgency was to spin as many covers as possible with phrases and propaganda images. Only it was never clear to whom and why.
He could have elaborated something more digestible, pondered a moment and competed for the Mercury Prize like any Burial. Nothing to do. Every session became something to share, hoping – but really? – to get his message across.

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Steve Reich, but if I ever did, I would ask him: “Did you really, when you recorded Come out, think you contributed to raising awareness of the many racist injustices perpetuated against the African-American community? Did your niche avant-garde have the same impact as Petey Greene or, I don't know, Hurricane by Bob Dylan?
I probably would have posed the same question to Muslimgauze-Bryn Jones.
I think the urgency to highlight the problems of the Muslim world was secondary to the narrative of his macroscopic obsessions.
Piecing together this disturbing puzzle, made of a hundred and more productions, you find the thread in the jumbled words of a madman sitting in a corner telling you a truth, in the wrong ways, times, places, speaking of himself in the third person (unfortunately he really did).
And this is the most fascinating aspect. Just as inevitably fascinating is the story of an unsettling character. As far as I can recall, Aphex Twin talked about him and I'm not sure that's something to be proud of.

And let no one ever tell Mr. Bryn Jones, wherever he is, that just a couple of years and he would have seen two hijacked planes slam into the WTC skyscrapers, with everything that happened afterward. Enough material for a record a day.
Aphex Twin says the 9/11 attacks were the work of the Illuminati but he is not the madman sitting on the sidewalk.
In contemporary art, obsessions must be reined in by cleverness, just as Reich did, utilizing politically correct to make his avant-garde less attackable or Aphex Twin, who limits the Illuminati stories for some yeah yeah interviews.

For Muslimgauze, goodbye until the next round, Ali Zarin permitting.

With empathy,

9C.

Listen to Ali Zarin