I recently re-aquired Farouk Ejineer (Arms Bazzar is pictured). This album is a classic in age, due to its release in 1997, but also due to enduring quality that it represents.
Often improvised music of happy accidents when working with tape-loops can feel contrived, and a bit arcane. What makes the music that muslimgauze creates transcendental is its complete lack of pretention. This is music created with a that fiery passion and dedication to the art.
The steps are deceptively simple.
Take some field recordings of middle eastern folk music, often made by the marginalized groups of people labelled as terrorists...or often enough, he has acquired unadulterated recordings of extremist groups creating music. These "drums-of-war" are just as provocative as the intimate recordings of the mother & sons around the cooking-oven.
The next step is to take these inspired recordings and imprint one's love into them. Muslimgauze has a pallete of tools relating from cuting the tape and mixing in "happy accidents" of analogue artifacts and magnetic interferance. Doubly, the processing equipement can filter/gate/chop the recroding and loop it into a wonderous osenata. This ostinnato alone can be masterpiece, the evocative music of the muslim world is there, but on top of that is the hum, hiss and pop of the world unseen. Can we actually hear the aether that exists beyond this mortal plane? A collegue of mine once called this sound, the sounds of cicadas...of course that remark can make it seem paltry. But I ask you to go out into the woods when the cicada's emerge again, and meditate to their sound...how alike is that pulsing to shunting of blood inside us. Are we not connected?
Finally comes the synthetic, external elements. Muslimgauze accomplishes this through using drum machines, synths or other equipment. Often he will use his own drums and instruments to lay his own tracks. Rather, to lay his own vitae upon the pieces of music. The drummer/studio musician is the person that can lay the backtrack down for a wonderful piece of music. It is the master that instead presents us, the blessed listener, with the intimate portrait of his being, nay a portrait of our very own being, and thus it transcends the limits of the media and the relationship of the listener to musician.
Of course, this can only happen when one allows yourself to listen to the music and let the the sound wash over you and permeate the barriers we impose that protect us from the NOISE of our routine.
It must be said, though his discography is massive, his life was tragically cut short. I suppose in a way, this blog is a way to give him my memorial service for him as have many others.
Though I must caution, he is also vilified because of his anti-american, anti-zionist/israeli and pro-palestinian political views. This is a large part of the fuel that fed his fiery belly. It's a large part of the venom that many had against the man behind the music project. I deign to call any of his discography propaganda. I don't think that's what really drives his creativity.
I invite you to listen to the excerpt provided below, mull it over and then begin your musical journies anew, hopefully with some new perspective if you've never heard of muslimgauze, or if you have, that this has bent your trajectory, ever so slightly into a rewarding exploration.
Is this really dark music? Is it really fearful music? Is it really joyful, somber, morose? How does it make you feel, as each minute passes? Merely noise?
Meditate and stretch each second out, pondering the way you feel in that very second, the passing moment. I believe there is something more there than islamaphobia, more than sadness when empathizing with poverty more than glorifying violent rebellion? I believe once the trappings of politics are divested, we become naked. Once the trappings of the physical are divested, we become divine...or at least in that moment of communion with music and the envrionment (cheesy I know, but try to let it happen once (a few seconds of time?) while listening to this).
Perhaps this can give us some sort of perspective on why there are such cultural rifts between the muslim world and the one I enjoy here in US. I very much invite your commentary and look forward to hearing of your experiences.
