Islamophobia: The Mid-East Musical Politics of Muslimgauze   

Tikkun Magazine,  July/August 2005

MUSIC REVIEW

Islamophilia

The Mid-East Musical Politics of Muslimgauze 

By Ron Nachmann

For the past twenty-five years, Europe's electronic music community has been ground zero for countless conceptually innovative artists who've used their work to challenge dominant cultural and political paradigms. However, none has done it as creatively and controversially as Muslimgauze. Working out of his parents' basement for the entirety of his seventeen-year career, Muslimgauze produced a highly charged catalogue of recordings, now standing at over 150 releases, that has earned him cult status amongst outre music fans worldwide.

The first English-speaking artist to blend abrasive experimental compositional techniques—tape loops, distortion, and Middle Eastern field recordings—with the percussive and melodic idioms of the Muslim world, Muslimgauze forged a new musical vocabulary that expressed the increasing cross-pollination of European and Islamic cultures since the 1960s. Informed by the electronic pop of the post-punk era—ambient, dub, techno, and industrial noise—Muslimgauze used his work as a platform to express a profound fascination with Islam and a heretofore unheard of musical anger at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

Because his music was entirely instrumental, Muslimgauze expressed his political opinions in two distinct ways: through interviews and the packaging and titling of his albums and songs. Certainly, many of his titles bespoke a nuanced vision of the non-Western world—see, for example, album titles like Lo Fi Indian Abuse and Hand of Fatima, and song titles like "Veiled Sisters" and "Uzbekistani Bizarre and Souk." But some more notable appellations—Return of Black September and Vote Hezbollah among many examples--bespeak a resolute sympathy with extremist politics in the Arab and Islamic world.

Packaging like the cover illustration of Fatah Guerilla (which featured a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini painted on a rifle butt) and the horrifically titled Sarin Israel Nes Ziona (Loosely translated as "Sarin gas kills Zionist Israel," replete with a closeup photo of a Saddam wristwatch) spoke of Muslimgauze's vision of Middle Eastern politics. Unsurprisingly, when interviewed, journalists frequently found Muslimgauze mechanically parroting the standard anti-Zionist rhetoric of Nasserite Arab-nationalists. Bitter comments like, "Vile Israel will feel the Palestine anger in full soon, I hope" (a remark from a Q & A published in 1998), are typical throughout the interviews archived on the official Muslimgauze website.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Muslimgauze's politics lies in its demographic inconsistency. The man behind the project name Muslimgauze was a notoriously reclusive non-Muslim, non-Arab native of the industrial town of Manchester, United Kingdom. Bryn Jones launched Muslimgauze in 1982, inspired by his outrage over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His hatred of Israeli foreign policy eventually transformed itself into an intense affinity with Reagan-era rogue states like Iran and Libya, as well as with Muslim guerrilla movements in India and Pakistan. It also fuelled a fervidly constant album-per-month output during a highly incognito seventeen-year career that yielded a mere handful of live shows and virtually no photographs of Jones himself.

But at their root, Jones's intensely partisan sympathies were mediated at best, for he never deigned to visit the Middle East. One can call Jones out as the de facto musico-ideological conduit between Muslim political extremists and the rarefied left-of-center intelligentsia of Europe and the United States. One can also see him as an obsessive crank holed up in his basement with apparently little better to do than churn out a pioneering catalogue of cultural syntheses. Jones's mysterious death in 1999 of a rare blood fungus only added to the Muslimgauze enigma.

What can we take away from a career like that of Muslimgauze? It represents the first counter-cultural musical attempt to think through the Arab-Israeli conflict seriously. Though we might judge his knee-jerk anti-Zionism as Orientalist in its appropriation of Arab revolutionary rhetoric (and unnuanced in its critique), the utopian cultural syntheses spelled out by Jones' compositional style suggest an entirely distinct political disposition at work. The challenge in appreciating Muslimgauze's music lies in understanding its maddening inconsistency, as both naively oppositional and profoundly conciliatory. In this sense, Jones clearly succeeded in reproducing the frustrating logic of Middle Eastern politics.

Music editor Ron Nachmann is a journalist, editor, and culture worker living in San Francisco.

Source Citation 

Nachmann, Ron. 2005. Islamophilia: The Mid-East Musical Politics of Muslimgauze. Tikkun 20(4):78