Nope this is not a post about the passage of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 by parliament on June 24 of that year, guess again.
I have been listening to William S Burroughs Break Through In Grey Room* this week, hell, I had the time to and I have adopted his cut-up technique in my post title; I’m very arty like that, doncha know.
Beloved by scores of rockers over the years – Jagger, McCartney**, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Cobain, Bowie and the, ever delightful, Throbbing Gristle^ have all copped some of lonesome cowboy Bill‘s cool over the years. Hell, the man made it to the cover art on Sgt Pepper’s. As well as basking in the reflected glory of hanging out with a man who dressed and sounded like a junior clerk in the accounts receivable department of Hades, most of the aforementioned folk played with the idea of the cut-ups for themselves, Diamond Dogs being the example that leaps most readily to mind.
At its’ simplest the technique on paper involved literally cutting up the text and randomising it, usually combining it with another unrelated text – the big idea being that such creative chaos can result in hidden meanings, truths and even in particularly propitious circumstances, predictions.
On tape, as Burroughs found in his early 1960’s experiments with Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin, there were more options available – ‘inching’ the tape, cutting it up, splicing it with radio static, other sounds, playing a phrase on repeat so much that language and meaning itself begin to break down, fade and blur. Break Through In Grey Room documents all this and more.
There are 15 tracks on the LP, some are snippets of street recordings of the Master Musicians of Joujouka and Ornette Coleman in 1973, there are a couple of performance pieces by Burroughs as he unveiled his schtick for paying audiences and the rest are the experimental tapes themselves.
Now … I have a good tolerance for this sort of thing, hell at the last count I owned 38 books by and on Burroughs and his milieu and I have read enough about junk, mugwumps, mandrake and puckered anuses^^ to last me a whole reincarnation, but there is a reason I had not sat down and listened to Break Through In Grey Room a third time in the 7 years I have owned it. It’s bloody hard going in places. The cut-ups show flashes of the wit and snarl of Burroughs that I love, but you have to sit through an awful lot of nonsense repetitions, radio static and unilluminating snatches of TV drivel to get there first. Should you meet someone who rates the 13 minute opener ‘K-9 Was In Combat With The Alien Mind-Screens’ then flee from him (because it will be a he) at all costs. On the flipside the 1:25 ‘Recalling All Active Agents’ is excellent.
Better still is a snippet from a lecture titled ‘Origin And Theory Of The Cut-Ups’ from 1976, which is just what it says. A piece called ‘Junky Relations’ from 1961 is another ‘straight’ bit of talk, Burroughs talking us through the chemical fraternity.
Best of all though is the closing ‘Burroughs Called The Law’ a routine that casts WSB as a rat-fink informer calling the cops on the Nova Mob – my brain has lost too many cells over too many years to remember if it is an excerpt from his book Nova Express. Sorry access denied.
I own six LPs by and with William S Burroughs, Break Through In Grey Room is the least accessible and listenable of them, but possibly the one with most historical value. This raises an interesting point for me about what a record collection is for – curation or (Crom forbid!) enjoyment? I like having interesting early works by an artist but if a lot of it sounds like a stuck Linguaphone record on 45RPM recorded on a microphone concealed in a fat man’s trousers, what’s the point? or is that the point, or point there is that, there is point that or …
You get my drift.
998 Down.
PS: Because I’m totally ace:
PPS: When my dad bought this copy of Nova Express. I can’t think where my mania for cataloguing everything comes from.
*not to be confused with Love/Hate Blackout In The Red Room, which is less tricksy but rocks far, far harder.
**Ian Sommerville, featured here worked in a studio furnished by the Divine Paul – who was a lot gnarlier and artier than the cheeky moptop the public perception of him seems to have been frozen at since 1964.
^Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson are thanked on the back cover here for early recognition of the importance of the cut-up tapes. Golly.
^^or is it anii?