Muslimgauze
Mullah Said

With a discography that exceeds 200 releases and shows no sign of ceasing its expansion even 24 years after Bryn Jones' untimely passing, thanks to a flood of posthumous releases between unfinished material, discards, remixes, and more, the Muslimgauze project risks being almost suffocated more for the fame of one of the most impressive discographies ever, or we often end up getting bogged down in discussions about his political positions on the Middle East.

This way, one loses sight of the core, the essence of this artist: the music, one of the most original and influential of all the 80s and 90s, major names in recent years' electronic scene like Shackleton, Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, and many others owe much to the Manchester artist, inserted today in a good DJ set, any of his tracks from those years would integrate perfectly with the current sound material.

Muslimgauze spanned over two decades of electronic music, vampirizing any style that came from the electronic underground, a unique ability to catalyze the zeitgeist of a certain sound and make it his own, immersing it to the brim in those Arab musical traditions he never abandoned. In the monumental discography, there are techno, hip hop, post-industrial, tribalism, dub, noise, ambient albums, a compulsive rhythm of material production typical of many exponents of the industrial scene taken to the extreme, an almost physical need to record music, live in absolute symbiosis with it. Thus, the politicized pro-Palestinian elements that pervade Muslimgauze's aesthetics take the form of a cause, a philosophical premise branded into the very throbbing flesh of that sound.

"Mullah Said" comfortably ranks among Muslimgauze's best legacies, it overflows with vital passion and exoticism, exhales mystical and sacred fragrances like precious Omani resins, alluring, sensual, and menacing, it almost seems to materialize before the listener like distant and blurred mirages.

The technoid beats flow slowly and smoothly, as if cushioned by a soft dub velvet. In the title track, a muezzin's chant is surrounded by sparse ethnic percussions, restless circular melodic phrases, and very deep rhythmic reiterations, the same goes for the two parts of "Every Grain Of Palestinian Sand," assaulted by increasingly gloomy anxious rhythms and the continuous overlapping of vocal samples and tribal percussions. In "Muslims Die India," always divided into two parts, the accomplishment of this suspended, meditative, and trembling, yet magnificently vivid and warm sound vision is reached; slowed and penetrating beats, irregular percussive swarms, sinister incursions of continuously looping voice recordings, the atmosphere is torrid and fascinating.

One must let oneself be drawn inside a record like this, be dragged by the hot sandstorms within, see its blinding mirages with different eyes.