Bryn Jones, the sole member of Muslimgauze, hails not from the Middle East, but from Manchester, where he cultivated a truly unique aesthetic by blending the timelessness of Arabic percussion with the digital arenas of sampling and dub trickery. Muslimgauze's early work was dominated by ritualistic instrumentals, in which insistent gusts of arid ambience gracefully sweep through the pulsing complexities of Arabic percussion. In his later work, the binary codes of his digital equipment are allowed to deliberately misfire, offering sharp staccato edits in opposition to the fluidly streaming samples of tablas. While the aural presence of Muslimgauze elicits abstract shimmers of desert imagery, his conceptual agenda is fervently concrete. Every release is an impassioned reaction to specific incidents related to Palestinian politics.
