Customer Reviews

Veiled Sisters

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Veiled Sisters showcases Muslimgauze's ambient (with beats) style. Subdued drums, dark atmospheres, and the usual samples. The songs are very long and segmented, but never boring. One part drifts seamlessly into the next. It sound stylistically similar to Maroon. Very highly recommended.

I have close to 50 Muslimgauze recordings and it's true that a lot of them sound very similar. However, having listened to a lot of ambient Muslimgauze, I feel this is one his strongest purely ambient releases. If you're really into his West Bank style with wild percussion, this might not be of interest. As far as ambient muslimgauze goes, you can't go wrong with Veiled Sisters.

In all, I've heard about seven Muslimgauze releases. Not a good enough representation of Bryn Jones' work, right? Wrong. While he created over 100 releases during his career (which spanned from 1982 - 1999), the vast majority of them have very similar sounds: they're sparsely rhythmic, often dub-influenced, with Arabian-music influences (sometimes samples taken directly from shortwave radio).

This is about the one exception to that sound. Veiled Sisters is described by Soleilmoon as "the most ambient of his recordings," which puts it in quite a unique category.

The album consists of two discs, each of which are distinct enough that they could have been two albums. Sister 1 is easily the more powerful of the two; it uses a simple bass drone throughout the whole disc, occasionally mixing in metallic clanks, whines, and muttered vocal samples. But they're only ornamentation, since that bass drone, so maddeningly sweet, carries the whole disc. Had it been made slightly deeper so as to pick up even partially on a subwoofer, Sister 1 would be absolutely brilliant.

Sister 2, on the other hand, is more technoid-influenced experimental. It's still based in somewhat ambient territory, so it's unlike the rest of Jones' discography. Regardless, it's quite weak in comparison to Sister 1. It doesn't have any of the groove or strength of the first disc, nor does it have any of the poppish hooks of most of Jones' work. It simply doesn't belong. In fact, it seems like Jones just churned it out to add a second disc to the album, which is intended to be a concept album about two powerful guns of some kind.

I still don't understand the fuss over Jones' work. I'm trying one more album that looks promising, and then I'm done.