On 02/04/2014 09:57 PM, David Lewis wrote:
> Today is the 100th birthday of author William S. Burroughs. One technique
> that he pioneered was the audio tape "cut up;" a random collection of
> spoken
> word bits achieved by turning on and turning off a tape machine at random
> intervals during newscasts. His efforts towards this end occurred years
> before
> anyone else worked in this way, and it would later become a major component
> in industrial music, particularly in the 80s.
>
> This is one of the few early examples of such work ever to be published. I
> have long wanted to truly date it, as "Early 1960s" is as close as anyone
> ever
> got to a date, and I'm sure Bill had no idea himself. The source appears to
> be New York City radio, flipping across the dial. WINS is mentioned at one
> point.
> Of course, fragments are fragments, and the aim was to achieve combinations
> of fragments that would tend to transcend the meaning of what was spoken
> and to create new meaning. But as close as I can get to a date for this is
> late April, early May 1965, owing to references to snipers in the Dominican
> Republic during the Civil War there.
>
> Can anyone else get closer, or am I on the wrong track?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6N2PZbkxzk
>
> David N. Lewis
> Lebanon, OH
Ahh, "The Junky's Christmas"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Junky%27s_Christmas> - required
listening every holiday season. --g
To the end of his life, Mr. Burroughs remained pessimistic about the
future for humankind. In "Ghost of a Chance," he lamented the
destruction of the rain forests and their creatures and wrote: "All
going, to make way for more and more devalued human stock, with less
and less of the wild spark, the priceless ingredient - energy into
matter. A vast mudslide of soulless sludge."
"William S. Burroughs, the Beat Writer Who
Distilled His Raw Nightmare Life, Dies
at 83"
- from obit by Richard Severo. NY Times,
97 August 4
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