Muslimgauze / CITADEL

Can a person have too much Muslimgauze? Never! Their 4th LP for Extreme, first issued in 1994, is the next treated to a reissue glow-up, expanded from 8 parts to 10 and revolving some of Bryn Jones’ lushest dubbing applied to entrancing rhythms.

Arguably one you would play to a Muslimgauze novice as a way in, ‘Citadel’ frames the legendary project at its absorbing best for over an hour of percussive dervishes and hallucinatory dub djinns that could not have come from any other mixing desk.

Crafted at a time in Manchester when Autechre, down Rochdale Road, were hatching their lushest work with ‘Amber’, and A Guy Called Gerald was firming up his classic jungle sound – both embedded in fertile scenes – Bryn Jones’ Muslimgauze was following his nose deep down the rabbit hole on his ones at The Cutting Rooms in Abraham Moss, churning out an unfathomable amount of material with nary a fuck for what the city outside thought about his work. He was a man on a mission to express solidarity with Palestinian people thru instrumental music, which may seem (and probably is) a funny, even ineffective, way to go about it, but either way he left us with a body of work that still beguiles and perplexes.

Save for the weirdos who fetishize his noisier gear, many would agree that ‘Citadel’ is a definitive Muslimgauze statement. From the title tune’s arabesque weft of taut, shearing strings and tabla to the meditative stereo slosh of hand drums in ‘Ferdowsi’ he shells signature material in the spatialised scythe of ‘Dharam Hinduja’ thru the ringing bells and microtonal drones of ‘Opel’ that resolve into a rollicking industrial stepper, to a jaw-dropping piece of nervy junglist spectralism in ‘Masawi Wife & Child’, an unmistakeable template for Shackleton with ‘Infidel’ and the angular stepper ’Shout Balek’ with its proto-sino grime orientation, or the spooling organ motif of ‘Purdah’ and a 16’ masterwork ‘Hama’ also mutual to his ‘Infidel’ set of the same year.