The Burroughs Tapes, by Mauve Zone

The Burroughs Tapes

by Mauve Zone

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1.	The Burroughs Tapes (part I) 08:52	info	buy track
2.	The Burroughs Tapes (part II) 09:16	info	buy track
3.	The Burroughs Tapes (part III) 08:22	info	buy track
4.	Bug-Powder (respool by <1) 04:06	info	buy track
5.	Alien Mindscreen (respool by <1) 06:59	info	buy track
6.	Interzone (respool by <1) 08:35	info	buy track

about

“How random is random?”
Live cut-up sessions with the W.S. Burroughs tape experiments.

It all started with Tristan Tzara back in the 1920s in a surrealist rally. Tzara proposed that he could create a poem (the highest of literary arts) by simply pulling random words out of a hat. This blasphemy, this violation of the pinnacle of human creativity was too much even for the surrealists. A riot ensued in the theater and they proceeded to ban Tzara from their ranks.

Cut to the 1950s. Brion Gysin and William Burroughs used the cut-up technique extensively during their various experiments, in words, video and sound. They created and kept a huge archive of tapes where they recorded these experiments of audio clips.
After meeting with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson (members of Throbbing Gristle at the time) in the 1980s , Burroughs gave them these tapes and they proceeded to arrange them in a collection called “Nothing here now but the recordings”.

This collection forms the basis of my experiments with the voice of W.S. Burroughs. Using random sequencing, random start and end points, reverse play, random juxtaposition and rounding it up with discrete soundscapes from Lyra-8 and Ether, i ended up with a long live session that i divided in 3 parts. These live sessions, true to the spirit of the cutup technique, utilize randomness at their core, so they are impossible to reproduce exactly (many thanks to the selected few that were part of that live session).

The idea of experimenting with cut-ups is to try to summon the ‘accident of spontaneity’. You can not ‘will’ spontaneity. You can not program it. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor.
Burroughs defined the cut-up method as an art for allowing the future ‘to bleed’ between the lines. He said that everything recorded could be edited and re-arranged, including reality itself. In this sense, it is a method for reimagining the reality from the random deconstruction of its semantics, allowing the subconscious and chaotic to emerge through the ruins of structure and order.
This form of art is by definition ‘experimental’, meaning that its purpose lies primarily in the act of doing it in itself, rather than adhering to any notion of ‘beauty’, ‘harmony’ or ‘coherency’ that we may expect from art forms.

credits

released September 7, 2020

Remixes by <1 (lessthanone.bandcamp.com)

Audio fragments by:
W.S. Burroughs
Brion Gysin

'Nothing here now but the recordings' selection and arrangement:
Genesis P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson

Listen to the album in its original form here:
youtu.be/HSyYeSj87Bs

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about

Mauve Zone Athens, Greece

Ambient and Experimental sound artist.

Born in 1981 in the concrete jungle of Athens and i'm still alive, mostly.

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