MUSLIMGAUZE — Cobra Head Soup

"... The masters for Cobra Head Soup were submitted to Staalplaat in 1997 and specially engineered for vinyl by Rashad Becker who is a premier audio engineer in Germany. In fact, Becker used to be in charge of sound and mixing for the live Muslimgauze sets in Germany and it is good someone of his stature lent his expertise on this release. Dub and dubstep enthusiasts will appreciate this release as it fits squarely with albums like Muslimgauze, Syrinjia, City of Djinn, Return to City of Djinn, and Ayatollah Dollar, among others. Some tracks may be familiar to those who have Remixs 2 and Red Madrassa. One of my favorite tracks here “Elect Izlamic Jihad” (from Remixs 2), a muscular yet menacing panther of a track on the prowl while an Arabic field recording (Quaran? Call to Martyrdom?) intones in the background. The track that provoked my interest most was “Cobra Head Soup” which reminded me of the atmospheric moments on Sandtrafikar. For lack of a better term, I would call this piece ‘Illbient’–a marketing term from the mid-to-late 90’s that describes a style of music that blends ambient, electronic, hip hop, musique concrete, and dub. Proponents of this style were DJ Spooky, DJ Olive, DJ Wally, Bill Laswell, Subdub, and Byzar among others. “Cobra Head Soup” is a deliciously eerie haunted dub excursion (already) saturated in vinyl record crackles with spacious oud strumming, ghostly atmospherics, and rumbling bass lines. A pretty good release, completists will want it, and c'mon…it’s Muslimgauze on vinyl, man." [Ibrahim Khider]

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