“Muslin Gaze”, an essay I wrote on Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze was just published in the summer issue of Middle Eastern arts & culture magazine BIDOUN. The print version is reliably lush and well worth seeking out.
You can read the essay online here.
nice to have words in print. expect more soon: this blog post = me procrastinating from another long piece for a journal… i’m so late for deadline that i’m terrified they’ll deploy their intern-assassin to my home.
Here’s a Muslimgauze tune I reference in the article, from his 1996 album Gun Aramaic.
Fantastic article, Jase! Thanks.
Did I just call you “Jase”?! Put it down to a typo, not a thinko! Sorry, Jace, I do know how to spell your name.
yeah great article, very enjoyable and thoughtful. Cultural artifacts pass through vacuums of ignorance and misunderstanding, reaching unexpected places and producing un-intended results. Authorship stands on shaky stilts and can’t see its feet.
really compelling take on what remains a necessarily ambiguous and tenuous relationship between politics of the artist and the objects/sounds that are produced. heidegger was a nazi who dated hannah arendt, and we are left to ponder, does fear produce only hate, or love as well…excellent and noisy article, it makes me refigure the sirens at Club Maria…
Great article! Interesting how electronic music in particular develops a political aesthetic rather than a political message. Have you ever noticed how similar muslimgauze and shackelton are? It’s like the same shit i swear. I love it.
re: the MG-Shack similarities… i didnt think of it until one of the guys i interviewed for the article, Ezra Ereckson of Systemwide, mentioned it! then i intvwd Shack, apparently a handful of folks have passed him MG music upon hearing his… he was flattered by the comparison but mentioned how they had very different working approaches.
“certain tracks change so little that they sound like a skipping record”
I can remember listening to Muslimgauze albums sober, where it sounded like nothing was going on. Then under the influence of psycho-active chemicals, I would hear all sorts of drones and shifting layers underneath the repetitive surface. The difference in my perception of what was or was not happening in the music changed dramatically. I don’t know whether Bryn worked this angle of his music consciously, or from an “experienced” perspective. His music was so good at creating “bad vibes” in me, that even sober, his music could induce all the familiar sensations of a bad trip in me. Powerful juju.
IK
your essay has been mentioned in idolater.