Music Arcades: William S Burroughs: Break Through in Grey Room

This is a close relation to William Burroughs The Doctor is on the Market, at least insofar as it was released the same year (1986) and bought by me soon afterwards. (One difference is that Break Through in Grey Room was correctly sourced and licensed, so it is still available.)

Unlike Burroughs' later readings from his novels, which are narrative skits and sketches, Grey Room revolves around his experiments — mostly in the sixties — with applying his famous cut-up technique to tape recordings. That is, the tape is cut up and re-spliced using editing techniques that rely on a degree of indeterminacy, or at least lack of conscious control.

I love the theory of this, explained in Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-ups, that if you cut up the present, the future leaks out. And the way the method allows for subconscious control of the editing, so that you tap information that is stored in your brain but inaccessible to conscious introspection. As Burroughs puts it, "cut ups put you in touch what what you know and do not know that you know".

As Wikipedia explains, "Burroughs taught the cut-up technique to musician Genesis P-Orridge in 1971 as a method for 'altering reality'. His explanation was that everything is recorded, and if it is recorded, then it can be edited." P-Orridge was closely involved in putting this record out, so we have to assume that he found the method worked, or at least produced interesting results. To appreciate fully the power of the pieces of these records, I think you have to suspend your scepticism — as with those people who claim to be able to hear the voices of the dead on tape recordings — which I find very hard to do.

Having said that, that fragment of Burroughs' voice reading about the "desolate market" that jumped out at me in Summer Will is there again in this record's Silver Smoke of Dreams. Listen to that too to appreciate the rhythmic pops and wows of editing with physical tape. Digital editing makes the process physically easier (and less "noisy") while also rendering it less amenable to subconscious control.