I don't think Bryn was ever ‘political’ – he didn’t have a political theory. He just reacted to events. When I knew him he hadn’t yet “got into” Islamic stuff. He was, I guess, in a similar space to a lot of industrial artists – ambiguous images of ‘oppression’, newspaper headlines, cut-ups, etc. I suspect he was motivated to shock and annoy people more than any compassion for people, and he used imagery accordingly – much in the same way as say, Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle did but maybe less extreme. I think he got into “Islamic stuff” just because it was in the news at the time. He was naturally Conservative and quite right wing. Very anti-communist – or what he understood as ‘communism’ – and an admirer of Thatcher, which was very different to everyone else in the North West at the time. But again, I suspect a lot of this was just to be contrary.
"He was extremely anxious when we got him to play at the V2 in Holland as part of the Recloose label showcase. He went into a complete meltdown at the gig. We had to play with him onstage and jam along to something we'd never heard before. Went quite well, I thought, but he was extremely pissed off afterwards – I think he thought we'd done it to humiliate him. Bryn was obsessed with the idea that we had ripped him off somehow – and I think he did this to other people as well – which is laughable. We hardly sold any Eg Oblique Graph at all, I ended up giving them away – and very few of the Buddhist On Fire LP. Nowhere near enough to cover costs. He was SURE that we'd pressed thousands of copies and sold them on the sly. I tried to reason with him for a while but eventually gave up. We never made up. It wasn’t worth the effort.
"How can I say it politely? There's nothing 'Arabic' about Muslimgauze's music apart from the fact that he nicked Arabic sounding samples. Arabic music is much, much more complex in harmonic and rhythmic structure. I think what I dislike about Muslimgauze is the loop-based sample formula. I find it lazy, boring and unimaginative – mood music.