Radio Free Islam
The label Sublime Frequencies collages times and zones.

By Ken Taylor

EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT'S Pop Conference, a Seattle event where music writers, professors, and pseudo-academics gather to panelize and pontificate musical thoughts, can get a bit wonky ("White Blood Sells: Race and the White Stripes' Moment in the Sun"), wacky ("Having a Seder with Jonathan Richman"), and weird (Greil Marcus "performing" an onstage review of Roxy Music's "More Than This" as it plays in the background). But without fail, its entropic discussions always tend to tease out more than a few groundbreaking ideas every year, specifically in regard to how music affects and is affected by changing global politics.

Among the most relevant at this April's conference, University of Auckland professor Nabeel Zuberi presented a paper titled "Islamopop: Listening to Muslimgauze after September 11, 2001." In his presentation's abstract he wrote: "As someone who regularly puts together mix tapes and CDs in order to help the music of the past and present make sense of the contemporary moment, soon after 9/11 I juxtaposed the early '90s Brit 'ardcore of Messiah's 'There is No Law' with Detroit Techno artist Andre Holland's 'City of Fear,' the '70s experimental electronics of Cabaret Voltaire's 'Voice of America/Damage is Done' and Throbbing Gristle's 'What a Day.' But the sounds that captured the terror and paranoia of the moment most graphically came from Muslimgauze."

The thing is, Muslimgauze wasn't a Muslim. He wasn't from the Middle East. And he was already dead from a rare blood disease two years prior to 9/11. Before his death in 1999, Bryn Jones, the young Mancunian behind Muslimgauze, created a dissonant drone of electronic noise with samples of Arabic speech, music, and news broadcasts that was encased in controversial, eye-catching packages and sold to a largely white audience. But for young Muslims in the West, he tapped into what critical theorist Raymond Williams calls a "structure of feeling" – a cultural hypothesis actually derived from attempts to understand.

"I'm a born-again atheist, or at least a card-carrying historical materialist [but] I was raised as a Muslim, and I recognize that anger and resentment and melancholy about the Palestinians, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq, India, etc., that forms part of a kind of transnational Muslim affiliation," Zuberi writes via e-mail. In his presentation at EMP, he argued that Islam isn't monolithic and that its art can't only be seen as coming from the East since so many Muslims are born in the West, shaped by "both Islamophobia and Islamophilia and all the images and sounds associated with them."

Besides Muslimgauze, others such as Banco de Gaia, Random Inc., and Badawi use similar documents as touchstones (read: samples) in their own, sometimes danceable, audio collages. But Timothy Taylor, author of Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture, argues these artists are hardly dipping their toes into political affairs; they're problematically adopting rhetoric and associating themselves with a cause while jumbling news bites with techno in their safely distant bedroom studios.

The carryover is that their music is quite engaging and – considering its esoteric nature and limited production runs – popular. In fact, Jones's "recombinant mode of 'bastard pop,' " as Zuberi calls it, is still being newly released, with his fans naming the tracks and designing the covers. "The media messages seem to have their own momentum, not defined by any single author," Zuberi writes.

Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop, who, with his brother and bandmate Rick, runs the CD and DVD label-collective Sublime Frequencies, is in tune with Zuberi's assessment. The Bishops have made numerous visits to Morocco, Palestine, Libya, Burma, and Iraq since the '80s, recording, experiencing, and absorbing sounds from those countries in their own experimental music (SCG have more than 70 albums) and for radio collages they release on their label.

Alan Bishop refers to himself as an "ambassador from anywhere," and he's amassed some incredible audio and video documents over the course of his travels. "What people are really buying into is the aesthetic of sound which I choose to record," he says about Sublime Frequencies. "Slickly produced, studio-engineered music from Cairo will never in a million years be as cool or as valid as a dirty-sounding guitar, bass, organ, drum Mideast hybrid band from the slums of Cairo cranking out a psychedelic quartertone-drenched freak-out recorded with one $20 microphone."

The label doesn't offer much in the way of Islamo-psych rock, but it has added more than a few chapters to a secret history of global folk music. And though it's a rather small collection so far, Sublime Frequencies has successfully avoided the run-of-the-mill style of survey that typifies boxed sets of world music. Woking with coconspirators Hisham Mayet and Mark Gergis, the Bishops have instead taken a rather unscientific but wildly DIY approach to ethnomusicology.

At first, the catalog seems a bit underdeveloped, and if you didn't know any better, the three DVDs might look like vacation movies taken from the heavily populated, touristy spots – if they can be called that – along the group's lengthy African and Asian jaunts rather than planned documentaries. That's not to say they're boring – far from it. One of the many highlights of Jemaa El Fna: Morocco's Rendezvous of the Dead – Night Music of Marrakech, for me, is watching a pair of record collectors jostle a portable turntable tone arm over some scratchy, ill-fitting 78s and 45s, creating a freaked-out cacophony that's reminiscent of DJ Olive or Christian Marclay at their most Bhangra-obsessed moments. It doesn't exactly get booties shakin', but it's a stunning auditory moment.

Rather than cut their films in some propagandistic form, the collective partners chose to leave the footage raw for the most part, with a modicum of editing and stylistic flair. The films are random snapshots that are playable in any order, indulging the Burroughs-ian/Gysin-ian concept of randomness. (But of course, as Burroughs once asked during one of their early audio cut-up experiments, "Just how random is random?")

The official word from the Sublime Frequencies camp is that the no-narrative approach is directly in line with their philosophy; "No spin, no agenda, just pure sound and vision, to be interpreted and further researched by those who choose to," Rick Bishop recently told Seattle Weekly.

And it's for this reason that the audio documentaries seem to work better than the visual ones. Sure, typical conventions of the cinema shouldn't really apply, but conventions of how we perceive and assemble images do, making it impossible to not try and string them together in a linear fashion. The bottom line is that random films are hard to watch. The sound and radio collages, however, are incredibly comprehensive in their obscurantism.

Standouts in the audio catalog so far include Gergis's ambitious double disc, I Remember Syria, a series of interviews, field recordings, and radio pieces produced between 1998 and 2000, and Radio Palestine: Sounds of Eastern Mediterranean, Alan Bishop's soundtrack to his 1985 visit. "You must call it Radio Palestine," says Bishop's Palestinian host – a bus stop acquaintance known only as Mohammed – in the disc's liner notes, "because someday there will be a radio station here which sounds like your recording of music from all over the Middle East."

Radio Morocco, Bishop's 1983 collage, re-slants even more Western cultural hegemony on the East, noting that Jacko's Thriller was as prevalent on Radio Tangier International as recordings by Moroccan songwriter Younes Megri. The disc's stringy clang – mixed with distorted percussion rhythms, video-game effects, Arabic radio announcements (ads? back-sells, perhaps?), microsonic flecks of salsa, and British football commentary – succinctly recaptures the chaos of a time when Polisario guerrillas operated in the northern Sahara and tensions were high throughout the country. The snippets on Radio Morocco, and all of the label's recordings, are brilliant documents, as jewellike as they are ephemeral.

"Arabic music is HIGH ART," Alan Bishop writes in the disc's notes. "At its best, it transcends Western music even as it utilizes it as a display of emotion and celebration.... May this disc download into your mind as an anti-virus. It worked for me. I don't even remember Thriller by Michael Jackson." Twenty years have passed since Radio Morocco was assembled, and neither Jackson nor the Middle East find themselves in enviable circumstances. Fortunately, though, the cultural exports of Kings Hassan and Hussein just might outlive those of the King of Pop.