For Bryn Jones's 60th birthday, 2021-06-17
I hosted a show on my college's radio station for three years. Since I wasn't doing a new music show playing the latest from the big indie labels, the music directors demanded a theme. "Psych" was my excuse for a genre to specialize in, and I stuck to it for a while.
Superficially, this was an ironic choice for a guy who abstains from drugs. But psychedelic music, both on my show and as a cultural-historical phenomenon, has diffuse boundaries and an inconsistent interior. The explicitly-labeled, 60s and 70s variety, I'll argue, was a meme genre. For every "Tomorrow Never Knows" or "Are You Experienced?", there was a "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" or "I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time". Fine tunes, but not a great departure in form from the dominant mode of rock and roll. This applies even to the vaunted 13th Floor Elevators, or their competitors for the title of 'first psych band', The Blues Magoos—camp psychedelia, draped in costume jewelry and crushed velvet. Like the lesser pretenders to named 'witch house' following Salem, they had access to the drugs and aesthetics, but lacked the vision, experience or talent to transcend the meme.
Put aside concept. Put aside all "studio magic". Tuck away the blotting papers, rolling papers. The kernel of extraordinary beauty in period-specific psychedelia is the roar and wail of Hendrix's guitar through a dimed stack. A sound that is not played, but summoned--or appears of its own accord. This is why, even at a boring show (or lecture!), I thrill at the sound of microphonic feedback. Even to the agnostic (a-gnostic, un-knowing), it is the insistent reminder that God is in the house. A momentary spiriting-away into the un-worldly.
Musicians of a savvy and visionary breed understand sound in this way. They know how to sound a Call to the listener, and will do so at the start of a song or album--think of the chiming guitar harmonics from "Breadcrumb Trail", or the rising hum of the intro from Akuma no Uta--or, for that matter, the air raid siren from "Hot N*gga".
An especially forceful example, drawing on the same principle as harsh feedback, is DJ Sharpnel's masterful "Over the Fullereneshift":
With the scream at 0:16, Sharpnel rips the listener out of normal spiritual and affective space. It primes us for the track's second half, a transcendent remix of Utada Hikaru's "Sakura Nagashi".
No musician's understanding of The Call exceeds Bryn Jones, sole author of the project called Muslimgauze. It's no accident that Jones' most popular piece, "Mullah Said", begins with a muezzin's literal call to prayer:
It's borrowed divinity, sure, but the Muslimgauze discography is full of demonstrations that he can produce the effect himself. When you hear The Call, you enter the world of Muslimgauze.
He can sound The Call with the gentle strum of a stringed instrument, as in "Sandtrafikar". I reflexively hear this sound in my head when I look at a beautiful man-made object, especially one made of gleaming metal:
Muslimgauze can sustain The Call, trancelike, as in "Lazzaream Ul Lepar":
Most arresting, most striking, is The Call in "Eye for an Eye" (A-side version)--an organ bass tone like the tolling of a bell, monolithic and black, coruscating with subtle modulation, and still amid delirious vocals. A thesis in a single tone.
(This version of "Eye for an Eye" is unavailable through normal channels, but you may email me at admin at zerogrind dot net if you'd be interested in listening. The B-side version available on YouTube is also good, but lacks the powerful introduction.)