Muslimgauze - Lo-Fi India Abuse
Muslimgauze has always been a frenetic source of rhythm. Spanning 90+ releases in the last 17 years, Bryn Jones (the man behind Muslimgauze) has consistently found new ways to wrap the sounds of the Middle East around your skull. Lo-Fi India Abuse, one of the last projects he embarked upon before his death in January 1999, finds Bryn in a head-on collision with Systemwide, a Portland, Oregon dub-influenced band. The liner notes relate that some of the tracks are remixes of tracks from Systemwide's Sirius release [on BSI Records]; but, like all Muslimgauze remixes, such content is a mere influence once the Muslimgauze haze has descended upon the music. There are otherworldly elements which creep into the tracks -- echoes of instrumentation that one wouldn't normally hear on a Muslimgauze release -- but the end is still that hot desert wind which Muslimgauze stirs up.
Shorter tracks make for more intense listening as you don't have the luxury of falling into the repetitive trance which comes from some of the longer pieces on other releases. There is a sharper focus here that results in tracks like "Valencia in Flames" which leaps and burns out of your speakers in quick, flaming fury and is quickly gone, leaving a smoldering track across your ears, the dub drop-outs still rattling around your head. Bryn has always made distortion of the master material, dub echoes, and clicking dropouts part of the Muslimgauze oeuvre, consistently pushing the rhythm of the track through these veils of sonic disturbance. "Al Souk Dub" finds us in the marketplace listening to the spray of voices and the rattle of machinery in the distance, all the while captivated by the hand drums in the foreground as their sound is splintered and fractured in such a non-organic manner that the dichotomy of human hands creating and mad machinery fragmenting the replay of the source is permanently welded together. "Catacomb Dub" resounds with the dust of forgotten hallways, sand stirred up by a passing tremor that takes a long time to return to its quiescent state. "Dust of Saqqara" has a hint of stringed instrumentation in the distance, but you can't reach it because there is a plague of black buzzing scarabs crawling all over you, their thick distorted buzz filling your mouth and ears.
There is something wrong with the wind that comes out of the Muslimgauze desert -- there always has been. What you hear is never clean, the sounds carried over the high walls and down the dusty streets to you is never free of scarring and mutilation. And Bryn sought this state; he sought to make music which would have an impact on you, much as his feelings towards the situations in the Middle East have always driven his music. It isn't a recreation of ethnic material, but rather one man's continual fight to alarm us and shake us from our complacency through the wild disturbances and explosive energies which bubble and fume from his material. Muslimgauze isn't easy listening, just essential.
Muslimgauze
BSI Records [1999]
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