Influence, in music, isn't always about the music itself. Sometimes, artists inspire influence for other reasons and get you to think about certain things a little differently or to look more closely at a particular subject. Being "political" doesn't always require writing protest songs with one's stances spelled out in the lyrics. Sometimes, artists can cleverly coax listeners to question things simply through a few careful signifiers.
I remember hearing Muslimgauze's 1984 LP, Buddhist on Fire, probably late in 1985 when my room mate at the time bought the album. The cover, of course, was very provocative, showing the aftermath of a Tibetan monk's protest after self-immolation. Right there I was educated by the fact that I didn't even know about this practice at the time. The second clue was in the "band" name, Muslimgauze. Again, I assumed there was some religious significance, but I didn't know much about it at the time. At that point, I was only interested in the music and what I heard on the album was pretty interesting.
Muslimgauze began in the early 1980s as simply a guy with a drum machine. His first releases were stark and minimal with nothing more than rhythm. Created solely by a British fellow, Bryn Jones, his approach was fairly blocky and crude at first, but by the time of Buddhist On Fire, his 3rd LP, he'd started to evolve a certain flair and sophistication. There were only 5 longish tracks on the album, but their rhythmic insistence was mesmerizing and song titles like Soviet Occupied Territories, Turkish Falaka & Dissidents In Exile gave the proceedings a subversively militant aura. It was all enough that, within my music collecting circles, Muslimgauze LPs, whenever they'd show up in the shop, were immediately snapped up.
I wasn't always able to buy them myself, but I'd always manage to record them on cassette from my friends. As each one came around, we'd get familiarized with the various terms of revolution used in the middle eastern conflicts. Without preaching or proselytizing, these records began to expose the hypocrisy of the situation and the injustices being committed against these people. It was a strange process whereby the use of the terms and the images on the album covers became an invitation to empathize and investigate.
The odd thing is that Jones never traveled to the area, had no relation, racially, to the culture and did not even consider himself religious, let alone a "Muslim". Yet he spent nearly two decades, until his tragic, sudden death in 1999, spewing forth a deluge of releases promoting the cause of these people. If he'd become rich from this endeavor, it might have been tempting to accuse him of cultural appropriation, but this was not in any way "mainstream" music. He did very small runs of these records on little indie labels. But he was prolific. He released dozens of albums over the course of his career and left enough unreleased material in the vault to keep providing new content for another two decades since his passing.
Over the years, his works evolved from their primitive drum machine roots into richly intricate compositions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then shifted into deliberately crude, yet fluid excursions into extremes of tribal downtempo dub, pushing distortion and bass frequencies to levels as radical as the politics which inspired his works. Today, the Muslimgauze catalogue spans some 200 or so releases with more miraculously surfacing each year. Sure, there's a good chunk that's a bit dubious in terms of it's quality, but there's a surprising amount which holds up and still sounds cutting edge. If it doesn't get your head bobbing, it should at least get it nodding in recognition that he's clued you into a real struggle which persists to this day.
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