** Edition of 350 copies ** John Bolloten a.k.a. The Rootsman is a musician and DJ based in Bradford, England. His musical career began when he was living in Edinburgh, Scotland and taught himself to play guitar in 1978 at the age of 13 and formed his first punk band. With his group, State Oppression, he made his debut gig in 1981, supporting the Angelic Upstarts. After three concerts, he decided that being a guitarist in a band was not for him and he retired from that aspect of the music business. He moved to Bradford in 1983 and quickly immersed himself into the local reggae scene. He worked for over two years in the local Roots Record Shop, where he began to be known as Rootsman. In 1985 he started selecting on local sound systems and the following year began to play on university radio and local pirate radio stations. This continued for a number of years until he founded his own club night, Dub Me Crazy, at the end of 1991.
Muslimgauze was the main musical project of Bryn Jones (17 June 1961 - 14 January 1999), a British ethnic electronica and experimental musician who was influenced by conflicts and history in the Muslim world, often with an emphasis on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The name Muslimgauze is a play on the word muslin (a type of gauze) combined with Muslim, referring to Bryn Jones' preoccupation with conflicts throughout the Muslim world. His discography (96 titles at the time of his death) has nearly doubled since 1999, although this counts reissued titles as well as brand-new titles. Jones' posthumous discography is known for including many studio variations of nearly all his music.
"Bryn Jones was not a practicing Muslim and never traveled to the Middle East. His recordings as Muslimgauze, however, qualified him as one of the Western artists most explicitly slanted in favor of the Palestinian liberation movement. Since the Manchester native’s works were instrumental, most of the political statement was inherent in the packaging: witness titles such as Fatah Guerrilla, Return of Black September, Hebron Massacre, Vote Hezbollah, United States of Islam, and The Rape of Palestine. Jones’s output was so idiosyncratic and prolific that he would remix anything he was given to suit his purposes and recorded an album almost every week. Jones could have been a potentially controversial figure if his releases were available in anything except extremely limited editions - usually less than one thousand copies of each title. Despite their lack of prominence, Jones’s blend of found-sound Middle Eastern and South Asian atmospheres with heavily phased drones and colliding rhythm programs were among the most startling and unique in the noise and electronica underground. The Muslimgauze project ended tragically in 1999 when Jones died suddenly of a rare blood disease. A number of posthumous releases including soon followed." - John Bush / Allmusic
