Muslimgauze: Search & Destroy

pasting the link to the playlist into the search box for the non-web player should work

brilliant. cheers!

very rough history:

1981-82 EG Oblique Graph years, early early proto-MG
dinky synth & rhythm box experimentation

1983-89 self-released mostly, either self-produced or later with John Dolf at The Mosque iirc
god I love this era, some of my fave LPS like Blinded Horses and Flajelata, very unique and arresting for such a minimal palette. all collected on the Vinyl On Demand label's 11LP boxset 'Chasing The Shadow Of Bryn Jones".

1990-94 "the Extreme years" with releases on that label as well as stalwarts Soleilmoon and Staalplaat
lush, widescape production mostly courtesy of Dolf.

1995-98 transitional period, start of the "limited" subscriber series, move towards home studio recordings but punctuated with increasingly experimental releases

1998-2000 exclusively home studio now, sound starts to go all over the map

2001-now posthumous era, diminishing returns that can basically be gauged by how long it's been. the earlier stuff is much better IMO.

posthumous 1st decade S/D:

Search:
Box Of Silk And Dogs (so good)
Sarin Israel Nes Ziona
Hummus
Iranian Inflight Magazine
(Muslimlim 028)
Azad
Fakir Sind
Baghdad
Your Mines In Kabul
Kashmiri Queens

Meh:
Hand Of Fatima
Alms For Iraq
Dome Of The Rock
Speaker Of Turkish
Wish Of the Flayed
Jah-Mearab
Dar Es Salaam
Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass
Jebel Tariq

Destroy:
Eye For An Eye
Arabbox
"Untitled" on Klanggallerie
Veiled Sisters Remix (why)
Red Madrassa (especially boring)

2009 was where I checked out, plz lmk if I missed anything

He wasn't recording at home. He worked almost every day in the studio with John Delf right up until he died. Also he only started working with Delf in 93. Lastly, a lot of the posthumous releases are previously unheard recordings. When he died Staalplaat still had a vast amount of material waiting to see the light of day.

really?!?! I coulda sworn I had that detail right from the book, moving to all-home-studio in '98?

I stand corrected abt Dolf's involvement in the 80's stuff and obviously I defer to yr direct knowledge here but I am really surprised that there are post-1998 Mosque recordings.

would also love any pointers to post-2009 stuff that falls into the "previously unheard" category

also, Delf, gah, that's what I get for not checking my book before posting

i am almost certain he didn't have a home studio but it could be that my memory is failing me here.

i'll have to have a look at what came out post-2009 in more detail tomorrow. i have mainly picked up the vinyl releases in that time. several of those are first time appearances on vinyl of later period staalplaat releases often featuring bonus material / versions.

Veiled Sisters and that overall dreamier sound is my favorite.

Just heard Veiled Sisters for the first time. Wow! Unlike a lot of the other Muslimgauze stuff I've heard, which admittedly isn't a ton, though I've always been a passive fan. This is beautiful, though (which is a word I wouldn't typically apply to this project).

yeah that's a personal favorite as well

Zul'm and Sandtrafikar and maybe Narcotic kind of have that vibe a little bit, maybe also the 2 volumes of Gun Aramaic

some really beautiful moments in a lot of the earlier 80's work as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUkCZ3B8z-M

that sounds really great

Listened to a bunch of the early material (1983-1994), had some thoughts.

Extremely good thoughts. These days I've come back around where I really only value two releases in particular: Zul'm, which essentially is meditative travelogue, and Drugsherpa, originally a 3" CD and thus a concentrated twenty minutes of experience. It's been enough.

I think Jones' single-mindedness is part of the appeal. I mean, however you feel about the guy's music, he was one of a kind, and gave birth to a sound that is immediately identifiable, which distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries imo. You are definitely correct however about getting the general idea of what a given piece will do within the first minute, but I view that as a feature, not a bug

Yeah, as I said in the piece, I like the music. I could put it on in headphones and get tons of work done. But the sounds and the visuals (and the titles) don't match up in my mind, and it makes the whole exercise somewhat off-putting. At times it reminds me of this Spinal Tap scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7vk5keNbRc

i hadn't read that piece that accuses him of anti-semitism. i have a vast amount of his music and would destroy it all in a second if i thought that was true.

i had several telephone calls with him in his last few years of his life and got to spend a day with him when i co-promoted him playing live one time. he was extremely difficult to engage in conversation and some of the phone calls where fairly tortuous but he did open up a lot more in person and while he was fairly vague about a lot of things he was clear he was not anti-semitic and i believed him.

anyway, i love almost all eras of his music (Zul'm is also a mega fave of mine) but as i have mentioned previously what he really, really needed was a good editor. there is just too much and thus too much that is not essential.

I've been listening to a lot of that older stuff lately as well. If there are any "politics" here they are like a distant refraction of reality, so many of the track titles are more about everyday life in the wider Islamic world, history, geography, etc. Flajelata and Blinded Horses are my fave early ones, and yeah Zul'M is great, also see Zuriff Moussa and Sandtrafikar for the later era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuNOQu7pgow

what is that? sounds like a mix of classic era stuff

seconded. i was expecting it to be somehow combined with Jack The Tab but it seems not to be.

He wasn't recording at home. He worked almost every day in the studio with John Delf right up until he died.

not trying to be contrary but how could this be true? studio time is expensive, in the UK super expensive afaik. even if you have a pal who believes in your vision and owns a studio, a day of studio time is rent money, real money. the only people who can afford to be in a studio every day are people who own studios or people with immense amounts of studio budget

Cheap studios were in abundance back then and i believe the Abraham Moss Centre was very cheap. Keep in mind that Bryn lived with his parents and apart from buying his small amount of equipment had just about zero outgoings, so all his money was pretty much spent on studio time. it's definitely one of the reasons he was so prolific as the more he released the more income there was to spend on studio time.

thanks for this -- that's really fascinating, and almost unique in music, as far as I know, this sort of combination of factors.

He was putting out about 10 albums a year on labels like Staalplaat and Soleilmoon and Extreme, who probably sold enough to trigger some level of royalty payments. So yes it seems to have been a cottage industry for the guy, at least on a modest level.

See also: Merzbow.

I wish I could remember my (possibly incorrect) source for the circa-1998 home studio move story, it's been (yikes) 35 years since I was on some MG-associated message board that is long lost within the internet, I feel like I heard it there.