The Rockies appeared through the gloom, slow beasts moving across the continent at the speed of time, oblivious to the tiny metal creatures carving up their sides. Headlights and taillights shimmered, their drivers hopped up on coffee and talk radio, heads on fire with hope and regret as they rehearsed thousands of monologues nobody would ever hear. What was the reason for all this consciousness? If we’re only here to replicate our genetic code and serve the demands of some blind Darwinian logic, why carry around heads filled with so much noise? Perhaps this is why every religion riffs on the renunciation of self. The bondage of ego. The pain of identity. It is by self-forgetting that one finds. And that’s all we crave in the end, isn’t it? Self-forgetting. To get out of our heads and see the mountain. My eyes flicked up to the sky, half-expecting to see God’s face beaming at my insight, even though I did not yet believe in such things.
This is the seventh episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.
Organizing my mp3 library is my preferred form of procrastination. Instead of reading the news, I make sure each song is accurately labeled and every album has the correct artwork. It’s a soothing antidote to the buckshot lunacy of the algorithm. The other day I noticed I have 2,362 songs by Muslimgauze. At first, I thought this must be an error, but no, I’ve somehow collected 189 Muslimgauze albums over the past twenty years, and new records continue to appear each month, which is prolific for someone who died in 1999.
I heard my first Muslimgauze record in 1998 while deejaying the midnight hour at WCBN in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rooting through the new releases one night, I found an album called Uzi Mahmood with a grainy image of a man’s face on the sleeve. The camera caught him looking at something off to the left, and he looked haunted, maybe afraid. There was no other information, but the hyper-saturated drums and clipped Arabic vocals permanently rearranged my sense of music. I imagined this record as an answer to the faceless mythos of groups like Underground Resistance, Drexciya, and Basic Channel.
Years passed before I learned that Muslimgauze was the moniker of a white guy named Bryn Jones, who lived in a Manchester suburb. After reading about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Jones created the Muslimgauze alias in 1982 and devoted the remainder of his life to making albums with names like The Rape of Palestine, Vote Hezbollah, and United States of Islam—a move that, from today’s vantage point, feels like strip-mining another culture’s trauma for experimental music. The singer and producer Lafawndah offers a different point of view: “It would be superficial to say that Bryn’s art would be more legitimate if he’d spent time there—that perspective has turned contemporary art into a failed state of a different kind.” Perhaps both viewpoints can coexist, but my sense is his frantic output points to something heavier and weirder that will forever remain beyond understanding.
Noting the “inconceivably deep sadness” that haunts Jones’s music, the critic Ian Penman finds it hard to believe this melancholy came from a region he never knew firsthand. “The sadness seems much deeper and further ingrained than that, approaching pathological—almost as if the terrible dispossessed ‘birthright’ of the Palestinians corresponded, secretly, to some personal scar or shadow in Jones’s own life.”
Although he was invited, Jones never visited Palestine. He hardly left his parents’ home. He was thirty-seven years old when he died. Twenty-five years later, the records keep coming.
At least 215 Muslimgauze releases are circulating today: that’s at least an album per month during his seventeen-year career. He claimed he recorded a new album every week. Record labels could not keep up. Stop, they told him. We have too much. After he died, his parents told his label to take what they wanted. “I declined,” said Geert-Jan Hobijn, who runs Staalplaat. “Then they said they would put the rest in the dumpster, so I took as many masters as I could.”
I’ve been thinking about this image all summer: all that music stuffed into trash bags.
My first Muslimgauze record, twenty-four years later.
Jones remains a black box. Some say he had no interest in politics or religion. Others think he was a zealot. Now only the music remains. For such an elusive figure, his music is profoundly present. He was a talented drummer whose production skills edged toward the otherworldly. His drums beat against your brain stem, hammering out rhythms that cast a freaky shadow across everyone else’s narrow turf of industrial, hip-hop, drone, techno, electro, and dub. The field recordings and radio broadcasts that pepper his songs are astonishing when you check the date: 1987, 1991, 1995. Where was he finding this material before the internet?
“There are no lyrics because that would be preaching,” Jones said in a rare interview. “It’s music. It’s up to you to find out more. You can listen to only the music, or you can preoccupy yourself more with it.” But how do you reckon with such an overwhelming catalog? My music widget says I have over 291 hours of Muslimgauze in my library—nearly 13 solid days.
And so the artist’s obsession becomes the listener’s obsession.
It’s a worthwhile journey. If you’re new to Muslimgauze, here’s a short playlist I’ve put together of my favorite tracks. Start with thirty seconds: “Jagannath, Jagannath Who?” from Jaab Ab Dullah. Then track down “Uzi Mahmood 7,” a fistful of razor-blade drums, crackle, and dub. These are the building blocks of the Muslimgauze universe. Next, give the moody heat shimmer of Mullah Said and Sandtrafikar a shot. (Artists like Vatican Shadow have made entire careers out of attempting to reproduce these two records.) See also “Veil of Tear Gas” and “A Small Intricate Box Which Contains Old Blue Opium Marzipan.” Or consider Ryoji Ikeda’s Remix #6, a blitz of vision-blurring drums that reduces every other breakbeat to ashes. The remixes are where things get most interesting. Artists around the world continue to remix Muslimgauze, and, in the process, they are rewiring, reclaiming, and broadening Jones's single-minded vision.
Jones’s fanatical output haunts me because his reasons remain unintelligible. An album every week. I try to imagine the rhythm of his daily life. His relationship with his parents. Those trash bags. His devotion has produced a body of work that continues to regenerate beyond the grave. New Muslimgauze albums and remixes will probably keep surfacing long after we’re all dead, and it’s a beautiful thought: a feedback loop of remixes from every continent until there’s just one great big endless drum.
Many of the above quotes are from The Quietus, which published several musicians’ reflections on Jones’s work, and it’s the most substantial information I’ve encountered. I’m still trying to track down Ibrahim Khider’s book, Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones, which is part of a handsome box set I cannot afford. Here’s a trailer from Cultures of Resistance Films.
Some Americans like to tie a pair of shoes together and toss them at a power line or a tree branch until they catch and hang. Very few people have seen these shoes actually thrown, and of the witnesses who have been surveyed, their reports vary as to the average number of attempts before the shoes find their mark, ranging from three to nineteen. This practice is more frequent in urban areas, although this might simply be a function of population density rather than any fundamental difference between the psyche of the city and the country. The style of shoes and their arrangement, however, is worth noting. Lone sneakers are common in the city, but when dangling shoes appear in rural areas, the formations tend to be more elaborate. In some parts of the Mojave desert, dusty shoes cover dead Joshua trees like leaves. Hundreds of black army boots hang from irrigation pipes over neglected crops in Oklahoma.
Some say a pair of tennis shoes draped over a telephone line indicates a place to score drugs. Often referred to as cosmic kicks or crack tennies, they serve as a storefront shingle for the local dealer. Others will tell you they mark a shooting gallery where heroin is used, a reminder that you’ll never walk away once you get hooked. These theories, however, do not explain the shoes strung over desolate roads or beneath the highway overpasses where nobody goes.
Many of these shoes once belonged to children. Seeing a child’s shoes hanging in a bottle-strewn alley bothers the soul, calling to mind Hemingway’s famous six-word story: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Some say these abandoned shoes memorialize a gangland killing. Others believe they mark the sighting of a ghost. But most levelheaded folks chalk them up to run-of-the-mill bullying in which some asshole kid steals another kid’s shoes and tosses them beyond his reach.
If any of these theories are true, there are an awful lot of victims, ghosts, and bullies in the USA.
This is the third episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.
When she was a little girl, she would watch the darkness in her bedroom, hypnotized by the grey-pink flecks that seemed to dance in the air while she waited for sleep. One night, she climbed out of bed to tell her parents that she saw fairies in the corner of her ceiling. Her mother dismissed her, saying it was only a trick of the eyes, but a faint smile played across her father’s mouth as he tucked her back into bed. “We’ll talk later,” he whispered as he shut the door. They never did.
She eventually learned those shimmery dots were the natural interplay of retinal fluid and optical cones. But part of her still preferred to believe they were dancing pieces of darkness, the living material of the night. “Science shouldn’t explain everything,” she told me. She often succumbed to earaches and ennui, and she would watch the sparkles in the gloom, the rods and motes that flickered just beyond her vision. “Sometimes I thought God lived in the shadows of the ceiling,” she said, and she would gaze at the high corners of the room whenever she felt overwhelmed, half-expecting to find an answer there. “Some habits come strange and never leave.”
And some habits are infectious. Years later, I would find myself murmuring to the fluorescent lights at the Gas ’n Go or the drop ceilings of the church basements where people insisted on living a day at a time. Like her, I would search for answers in forgotten spaces with cobwebs and patchy paint jobs.
This is the second episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.
Maybe you’ve heard the stories, the baroque theories on late-night radio or the soliloquies of sunburnt men who mutter at the traffic. Like the one about how they trained telekinetic children to interrogate terrorists and accidentally discovered how to bend time with a pack of playing cards. Or how they dosed soldiers with LSD and dropped them in a forest to see how they would perform in combat. (Not very well.) Or the one about the college student who volunteered for a behavioral study. After feeding the kid a mescaline cocktail, they watched him pace a padded room for three days before he sat down and announced that he was a glass of orange juice, and if anyone came too close, he would tip over and spill himself all over the floor. They say that kid is an old man now, still sitting motionless in the corner of an institution in Virginia.
They’ve invented sights and sounds that will ruin your personality and cause you to soil yourself in the middle of the street. Aural destabilization, they call it. Its milder variants are used for dispersing street protests, but its more extreme applications belong to the land of rumor, those two o’clock in the morning stories told by creatures teetering on barstools who say they’ve heard a sound so loud it heats the air, dredging up your ugliest memories and rupturing your intestines if you stick around long enough.
These stories always boil down to the spectral they, don’t they? The black choppers and nameless spooks, the shadows that haunt the minds of wild-eyed loners with custom-built radios, their speech riddled with dates and acronyms.
This is the type of man I would become for a while.
The longest day of the year, and, thank god, soon we’ll be making more night. The weather has been vivid lately. A heat dome has settled over the Middle West, the moon was extra bright last night, and I saw a rainbow in the parking lot yesterday.
A headline in The New York Times says “America is Heading Off a Cliff,” which is pretty evergreen. Last week a computer programmer claimed a chatbot achieved consciousness. Either Google is abusing sentient chatbots, or one of their chatbots drove a man insane. I’m not sure which scenario is more frightening. This morning I flipped on the local news, and they were interviewing “the first non-celebrity family” to ride a new waterslide. All of this feels like weather, too.
Tonight I’m trying to figure out what to do with this journal. I don’t want to write about current events or, god forbid, issues. There are far too many faith dealers, soothsayers, and thought leaders. The last thing this world needs is another opinion. Certainly not mine. On the other hand, writing about my life feels increasingly recursive, more and more like a dead end. Probably because I’m doing my best to live a boring life of routine.
I’m increasingly interested in digging deeper into fiction, particularly as the 21st century grows more science-fictional by the minute. I’d like to rewire this station into a space for experiments and exercises, for writing weirder and trying on points of view I don’t necessarily believe. So this journal will become a halfway house for homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled snippets from the past, and a few bloopers from the novel I’m writing. I’m going to call this series Interstate Scenes, and if I reach a decent number, maybe I’ll shape them into a little book. Hopefully, this feed will get a little strange. But I promise, I’m okay.
Mostly sunny, the heat is building, and there’s a strawberry supermoon. Wall Street fell into a bear market today, and last year’s attempted coup is being relitigated on television in the hope that justice might still exist in some corner of the universe. I admire their faith. The television followed this up with a special report about dogs overdosing on their owners’ drugs. Later, a senator solemnly said, “We just want to keep guns out of the hands of people who might use them for violence.” The weather lady looked a little freaked out as she stood before a map soaked in neon red, forecasting a heat index of 110 degrees and 80-mile-per-hour winds.
A few months ago in London, I had a beautiful bowl of ramen so spicy I got the sniffles and glimpsed the face of god. I went back every Saturday like church. Now I’ve found something similar here in Ohio: a Szechuan lamb dish soaked in chili oil and cumin that can only be described as holy. It’s good to have a meal in your life that demands regular pilgrimage.
Hypothetical art project: a device that gives you fifty dollars each time you share an embarrassing personal detail—but there’s a one-in-fifty chance it will share a picture of you and your secrets online.
Sometimes we go to IKEA just for a nice and affordable meatball dinner.
Tornado sirens rang the other day while I played mahjong with the in-laws. The sun went down at 9:02pm, the humidity is building, and there’s a supermoon tonight.
You can never see further than your headlights: this old slice of trucker philosophy makes more sense to me with each passing year, how I stagger through my life, pretending I know where I’m heading even though I haven’t got a clue.
But there’s also the rearview mirror. I’ve been rewriting the same book for so many years. Each time I think it’s ready to submit somewhere, I strip it for parts and start again. With each draft, I’m becoming a better storyteller, and this steady improvement keeps me going. This also means learning to keep my eyes on my own page and run my own race. (Quitting social media has helped tremendously with this.) But I’m determined to finish this book this summer, so I’ve shifted gears, and now I’m focusing on output. At least five pages per day, come hell or high water. Progress not perfection, as they say. Clichés are learned the hard way.
I’ve honored this quota for four weeks, except for taking yesterday off to recover from a head cold. Snuffling in bed feels unwholesome when the sun is shining and it’s eighty degrees. When you have a cold in the summertime, it feels like you’re doing something wrong.
After revisiting the bonkers wonderland of The Running Man last month, I picked up the original Stephen King novel from 1982. He wrote the whole thing in a week when he was 35, just to see if he could do it, and he later called it “a book written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing.” It’s a little unpolished, sure, and it definitely reads like something written by an angry guy in ’82. But still, the story rips along, and few writers can summon bug-eyed, fever-dream crazy like King:
A carnival of dark mental browns . . . names came and repeated, clanging in his mind like bells, like words repeated until they are reduced to nonsense. Say your name over two hundred times and discover who you are.
Tonight I’m dipping into Murakami’s 1Q84 to see how a brick-sized epic from a master works. I’ve never fully tuned into his wavelength, but I’ve admired him from a distance.
And all the while, I’m itching to move to the desert and drift along new roads at night with tunnels of sand in my headlights. But now is the time to stay still and count pages. First things first: another durable cliché.
Memorial Day in Ohio. Clear skies, highs near 90, and the sun went down at 8:54pm. The moon is brand new, and my computer gave me an eye exam. I stood ten feet away from my screen, read aloud the five letters that appeared, and a robot renewed my prescription. It felt very futuristic and a little sad.
Maybe I don’t want to deal with the future. My two favorite television shows right now are amplified and campy depictions of events that took place fifty years ago: Gaslit and The Offer, which reanimate the shenanigans behind Watergate and the making of The Godfather. In both shows, the 1970s are drenched in booze, cigarette smoke, and garish colors. Everyone must have been walking around back then with a splitting headache.
There’s this track that’s been rattling around my mp3 library for nearly twenty years, and I can no longer tell if it’s fantastic or terrible. It starts with a canned dance beat and a vampy keyboard, neither of which have aged well. (And it’s interesting, the subtle texture, the sonic patina that renders something dated rather than timeless.) Then Johnny Cash begins to growl his funereal cover of Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness” across 140 beats per minute. Susan Sontag once said that camp puts everything in quotation marks. Pairing acid techno with Johnny Cash seems like it automatically belongs in extra-bold 100pt quote marks. Yet somehow, this mash-up feels oddly earnest, and I always catch a guilty rush around the 3:50 mark when the synthesizers start grinding away while Cash sings about how he hopes someone can save him from this darkness.
The Munich Mash-Up Issue | White label, 2004 | More
In a similar yet far more calculated but no less bizarre vein, there’s that Teddybears track from 2006 with Iggy Pop, “Punkrocker”. I have no idea how they landed Iggy Pop, but his line about being “sincere” in an elegy for punk rock set to disposable electronica that became a car commercial could probably launch a thousand annoying dissertations in cultural studies and media theory.
The Running Man (1987) is weird comfort food. I find myself craving every now and then, like a favorite meal. I first saw it when I was twelve, and nostalgia tends to tint objectivity, but I think this movie only improves with age. They don’t make them like this anymore, with that distinctly 1980s blend of bleak social commentary, schlocky spectacle, and self-aware humor that remembers, first and foremost, to entertain.
Over the years, it’s become my ur-text for a sleazy future of trashcan fires, black markets, station hijacking, and vicious game show hosts. And if you squint at it a certain way, it’s a genuinely frightening portrait of America’s appetite for violence. Thanks to one of the most inspired casting decisions ever made, The Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays the ringmaster of televised bloodsport with terrifying charisma. But the real villain is the crowd. They just want to watch people die.
The entire film hinges on a small moment after Schwarzennager refuses to bash in the head of a large man dressed like a Lite-Brite who sings Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro while he electrocutes his victims. (That was such an enjoyable sentence to write.) The crowd begins to boo, tentative at first—then they gather steam. And Dawson looks at the bloodlust on the faces of these old ladies and nebbish accountants, and he looks scared. Because these people want to watch a murder, they don’t care who. And when Schwarzenegger starts righteously slaughtering the baddies with razor wire, a chainsaw, explosives, and a belt-fed weapon while delivering clunky one-liners, we’re cheering too. We’ve become the crowd.
And somewhere in my brain, my sense of The Running Man is soundtracked by this song by Bremen, which captures the nervy end-of-days energy of midnight sirens and searchlights sweeping the sky.
Bremen – Entering Phase Two
Second Launch | Blackest Ever Black, 2011 | Bandcamp
The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and I’m wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists.
First off, I am a phenomenal driver with a solid resume: raised in metro Detroit, six years of food delivery, hundreds of thousands of miles of cross-country driving, and no accidents yet. I’m accustomed to the gawkers, droolers, speed freaks, and road ragers that clutter our highways. But lately, it seems like more Americans are unraveling behind the wheel.
Cars drift at twenty miles per hour, veering into the gravel and weeds. Yesterday a Jeep came crashing into my lane while I idled at a red light. If I hadn’t reversed, I would have lost the front half of my car. Today a lady chewed my bumper while I puttered along in a column of slow-moving rush hour traffic. I could see her in the rearview, giving me two middle fingers, rotating her arms like a referee. Then she stuck her head out the window and screamed. She drove a Honda Civic and had a professional hairdo, which made the fury on her face more frightening. Where does this rage come from?
Strange, the psychological liberties granted by three thousand pounds of metal and a windshield. I doubt that woman would have given me two rotating middle fingers at the grocery store. Perhaps the expectation of instant access, immediate gratification, and center-of-the-worldness has spilled from our screens into our cars.
I’ve stopped doing business with streaming music services. The algorithm has transformed music into an endless churn without sense-memory, and the idea of renting the same songs every month feels ludicrous.
But nowadays, tending to an mp3 collection feels like trying to retrofit an 8-track player. I’m spending an increasingly significant portion of my lifespan wrestling with Apple Music. Sync issues. Playback issues. And many of the songs I’ve purchased from Bandcamp or ripped from vinyl tell me I’m living in the wrong region or country and refuse to play.
The problem of managing a digital music library seemed like it was solved twenty years ago, and I’m not sure why it feels like a problem again. Can anyone recommend a solid alternative to Apple Music that will sync my mp3s with my desktop and telephone? So far, I’m leaning toward Vox, but there must be something better.
Here’s an all-time favorite album from Andreas Tilliander that I’d love to play on all my devices at the same time, if possible. Absolutely flawless machine bliss.
