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DJ/rupture writes on Muslimgauze in Bidoun:
He had no interest in making Middle Eastern-sounding music. Jones was after Middle Eastern-sounding sound… In a 1994 interview, Jones said, “I wouldn’t talk to any [Israelis]; the whole people are disgusting, so no, I wouldn’t.”… I’m not the only one struggling to come to grips with the music’s context. One commentator on the music networking site Last.fm advises newcomers to “get past the ridiculously fundamentalist/trollish titles of his tracks and albums as they bear no relation to the music at all.”
But of course not all of the track titles have anything to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict – my favourite track is called “Turkish Manipulator of Limbs”, for which I struggle to find a particularly anti-Israeli meaning.
I first discovered Muslimgauze in Buybook in Sarajevo – a whole row of CDs that looked as if they’d been slipped in while nobody was looking. Without any context for the sounds I was hearing, I assumed it was some mixed-culture kid from somewhere in the fertile crescent who’d discovered how to splice his own tapes. When I found out that Muslimgauze was a Mancunian bedsit musician who never went anywhere near the middle East, it didn’t have any impact at all on what I heard – just the same as when I learnt Bruce Chatwin’s life story, it barely impacted on the impact of what he’d written.
In some ways, as the mythology that somebody constructs around themselves becomes more complete it also becomes more compelling. DJ/rupture is right that Jones was interested in “Middle Eastern-sounding sound” – and achieved it magnificently – but that interest quickly infected his entire artistic persona. The persona was like a scaffolding on which the music was erected, but at the end, even when the music was complete, the scaffolding couldn’t be brought down.
I don’t agree with Jones’ politics – who in their right mind would? – but that doesn’t make the music any less powerful. That was the power that he was aiming for, I think – the power of the dispossessed, the defiance of the raised fist, the shock of the child soldier, the threat of twisted metal – and although I hate to say it, his vision has been the soundtrack to the first decade of the 21st century.
(Bonus beats: DJ/rupture’s now-classic Gold Tooth Thief mix, for free.)
Tags: DJ/rupture, Muslimgauze