Muslimgauze

CD version. Lo-Fi India Abuse is one of the albums by Muslimgauze that appeared after the death of Bryn Jones on 14 January 1999. Recorded in 1998 and first issued on CD by BSI Records in August 1999, it sets pieces made as pure Muslimgauze tracks beside reworkings of material by the group Systemwide. The record moves between hand-drummed dub, cut-up edits and sudden surges of electronic noise.

The credits name Muslimgauze as the only recording engineer, with every track dated 1998. The source for the remixes was Sirius, the Systemwide album that BSI had released in 1997, a record of bass, drums, turntables and the voice, melodica and percussion of Ezra Ereckson, who also designed the original Lo-Fi India Abuse sleeve. A limited LP edition followed on BSI in February 2000. For this reissue the album was remastered by Višeslav Laboš, with a new sleeve by Oleg Galay.

As the Brainwashed review describes it, nearly every track rests on hand percussion at shifting tempos and intensities, and at least half of them are cut through by bursts of electronic noise. The opener, Antalya, layers drums, whistles and wailing voices that are chopped, repeated and thrown into delay. Valencia In Flames starts from a dub bass line, hi-hat and a distant vocal, then breaks them apart with stops, restarts and echoes. Al Souk Dub brings market sounds, voices and drones into a slow percussion mix, while Dust Of Saqqara, the longest piece at almost eight minutes, runs a heavy pulsing electronic tone over an old drum machine pattern. Android Cleaver is the harshest moment, with jabs of noise against a single vocal sample repeated until it loses its words.

Reviewing the original CD for Brainwashed in 1999, some eight months after Jones's death, the reviewer counted about twenty new Muslimgauze discs already issued by Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, BSI and others, and called this one "yet another great Muslimgauze release". The titles move across a wide map, from the Turkish coast of Antalya and the Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara to the Dogon of Mali and their Nommo ancestral spirits, in keeping with the way Jones drew on the history and conflicts of the Muslim world and its neighbours. Other Voices Records has since reissued several other titles, among them Uzi, Farouk Enjineer, Intifaxa and United States of Islam.

Single CD in a four-panel digifile, limited to 500 copies, released on 27 October 2022 by Other Voices Records together with Kontakt Audio (VOX 74 CD / AKT 07), remastered, with the nine tracks of the original 1999 album.