FEBRUARY-MARCH 2008
Cut It Up
Paul Hawkins talks to Joe Ambrose
Tristan Tzara (Sami
Rosenstock aka Samuel Rosenstock), a Romanian poet,
essayist, Dadaist & collaborator with the painter and
originator of the anti-art Dada movement, Marcel Janco,
unknowingly used Cut-Up at a Surrealist rally in the
1920`s when he offered to create a poem from words pulled
at random from a hat. Although he later fell out with
Andre Breton, who is generally accepted as the founder of
the Surrealist movement, undeterred Tzara went on to
spread the Dadaist word far and wide throughout Europe
and beyond. Dada began around 1914 as politically-driven,
protest anti-art. Embracing chaos and irrationality in
defiance of the predominance of what they saw as the
obsolete art and cultural aesthetics, they opposed the
virulent rise of world war as an anti-cultural and
anti-intellectual conformity movement. George Grosz later
recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest
"against this world of mutual destruction".
Dada is a cited influence and reference point of various
anti-art, political and cultural movements including the
Situationists and culture jamming groups like abrupt, the
eec and the cacophony society.
Cut-Up techniques were
improvised with and further developed by French artist
Gil Wolman as part of his letterist technique. By the
1950`s painter and writer Brion Gysin was credited as
discovering Cut Up. He began to use Cut Up after he
placed a pile of newspapers on a table to prevent damage
as he cut papers with a razor blade. He noticed that his
sliced layers, when randomly laid out, created some
memorable and lucid meanings. The beat poet Sinclair
Beiles, who would later co-author the Cut-Up text,
Minutes To Go, with Gysin, Gregory Corso and WS
Burroughs, and the writer Julio Cortazar made regular use
of this method. Gysin introduced it to WS Burroughs at
the Beat hotel and they worked on searching for the
potentialn real or true significance of a text. Burroughs
and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of their
Cut-Up collaborations, though not until 1977. The process
has then been used most notably by David Bowie in his
lyric writing, and later by Kurt Cobain. Many emergent
musical genres including dub, hip-hop and electronica all
extensively use this method by cutting and pasting beats,
samples and sound. Jeff Noon developed his cobralingus
word remixing technique based upon the Cut-Up method and
Thom Yorke took it right back old skool stylee when
constructing lyrics for the Radiohead album Kid A. He
wrote one liners, put them into a hat and drew them out
at random while the rest of the band rehearsed and
recorded the albums songs.
There is now a huge
proliferation world wide of recognised sound art and its
performance that has built on a long-standing tradition
of diverse art practices that focus upon the interactions
between sound and image. Spoken word, sound poetry, site
specific sound installations and found or enviromental
sound have experienced a rapid growth as forms of
artistic practice. A burgeoning avant garde
electronic/acoustic movement within popular and unpopular
cultures of music has been made partly possible by
digital laptop recording technology. Sound Art is created
without the excess baggage and cost of recording studios
and has certainly combined creatively with a wide range
of accessible free image and sound manipulation software.
The Karrier is a
café/restaurant/bar that puts on DJs, concerts,
conversations with artists, sound art, performances, film
and video screenings. It is situated in Flæsketorvet in
Copenhagen, Denmark and has been running a Sound Art
project from December last year (until January `08) with
the Cut Up as its central theme and a collaboration with
the Museum for Contemporary Art at Roskilde, which has
Denmark’s largest collection of sound.
Having an interest in this
method of working myself (currently as applied to the
manipulation of sound), as well as a long held
fascination with the Beat Scene; WS Burroughs, Gysin,
Hamri, Kerouac et al, I canvassed opinion from art
terrorist, writer and film maker Joe Ambrose. I 1992 he
co-organized the Here To Go Show in Dublin with musician,
writer and cultural historian Frank Rynne. This mixed
media art show was both a celebratory observance and an
affirmation of the cultural impact and significance of
the work of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs; both
individually and collaboratively. The event was filmed
extensively and the movie Destroy All Rational Thought
documented many aspects of this week long arts show. It
was initially released on video and then later, a year
ago, as an enhanced DVD. Joe and Frank formed the anarcho
Islamic influenced collaborative cultural vehicle,
Islamic Diggers. They toured extensively throughout
europe, carried out Cultural Intifadas, recorded and
curated a double album called 10% File Under Burroughs.
Islamic Diggers track Hashishin is currently being used
as part of the sound art project at the Karrier Bar.
I asked Joe
(pictured above in Marrakesh Dec.`07) how this all came
about....
Islamic Diggers did a gig at
the university in Copenhagen. We showed the unseen Antony
Balch footage of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs over a
live soundscape which we generated on the night. No two
shows were the same.
What else do you
remember of that tour?
I think I was recruited onto
an anarchist soccer team the night of that Copenhagen gig
we did, which was one of the good ones on that tour. I
think Copenhagen and Ljubljana were the best, and best
attended, shows. I found that we were operating on the
same level and within the same parameters as a lot of
people in northern and Mittel Europe, in Scandinavia and
Germany.
The new film on
WS Burroughs involved Islamic Diggers didnt it?
We’d already met with
Lars Movin in London and he came along to the Copenhagen
show. Lars just used a piece of Islamic Diggers music on
his and Steen Møller Rasmussen’s new documentary
Words of Advice – William S. Burroughs On The Road,
which concerns itself with a reading tour of Denmark
which Burroughs undertook. We’re honoured to be on
there with Patti Smith and Bill Laswell and other fellow
travellers. It was previewed a few months ago at the
Danish Film Institute.
Through December 07 and Jan
08, the following tracks are played every hour at the
Karrier Bar;
08.00 Walter Ruthmann:
Weekend, 1930 (11:30)
09.00 Pierre Schaeffer: Etude
aux Chemins de Fer, 1948 (2:50)
10.00 Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Etude, 1952 (3:15)
11.00 Steven Reich: Come Out
1966 (12:48)
12.00 Brion Gysin: Cut Up,
1992 (1:45)
13.00 Islamic Diggers:
Hashishin 1996(3:45)
14.00 Scanner: Disclosure,
1984 (5:18)
15.00 Christian Marclay:
Maria Callas, 1988 (3:03)
16.00 Christian Marclay:
Johann Strauss, 1998 (2:28)
17.00 Kenn Ishii: Come out
– remix, 1998 (7:18)
18.00 Hans Sydow: Dada 3,
2000 (2:56)
19.00 Johan Olsen: MCIC
ANASYS, 2000 (5:03)
Tell me more
about the Islamic Diggers track...whats it about?
The lyrics of Hashishin, the
track chosen for the Karriere program, are a kind of a
Cut Up. We took slivers of text at random from a book of
the same name which we’ve written concerning Hassan
I Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. Hassan is
something of a hero or anti-hero in the writings of
Burroughs, Gysin, Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey. I
guess that’s where there was originally a strong
connection with Islamic Diggers. Then we have other
shared interests with Gysin like Joujouka, Dreamachines
and a certain style of social subversion. Gysin was an
avatar for so many things in the areas of sound poetry,
performance art, electronic music, dance music, plus a
variety of areas of investigation which’ve come into
their own via digital or online spheres.
The track is very hard
hitting and was taken from the 10% File Under Burroughs
album which drew together a lot of music and text from
the Here To Go Show; Burroughs and Gysin sound Cut-Ups,
Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson’s Here to Go tapes, as
well as contributions from Herbert Huncke, Paul Bowles,
Islamic Diggers, Terry Wilson, Ira Cohen, Scanner, Chuck
Prophet, John Cale, Marianne Faithfull, Stanley Booth,
The Gnoua Brotherhood of Marrakesh, Bomb the Bass, The
Master Musicians of Joujouka and Bill Laswell’s
Divination and Material. Joe, in what other ways has
Gysin influenced you and Islamic Diggers?
Islamic Diggers wrote the
track Gazelle of the Desert with Robin [Robin Rimbaud,
AKA Scanner] using some Brion Gysin samples, we’ve
shared aural space with Scanner and Brion Gysin a lot of
course. He didn’t investigate other areas which
interest me, such as drugs or love, and he certainly wasn’t,
as they like to say in Morocco, my cup of tea. For a man
with such radical ideas in art, he had unbelievably right
wing ideas in politics. And the Islamic Diggers agenda,
as I see it, is one of the left. So while admiring Gysin’s
panache in certain regards – he was clearly a brave
and gutsy artist – I would hope that the Diggers
have brought something additional to the table.
What was your
reaction when you were asked to contribute to the
project?
It’s principally an
honour, of course, to be included in any cultural
dispensation which includes Stockhausen. I remember the
time he was supposed to do a performance in Dublin when I
was a student. I had plans to go see him but there was
the biggest snow-in in twenty years and the show got
cancelled. Seeing Islamic Diggers included alongside him
is some kind of compensation for being thwarted all those
years ago.
Thats good
then....
I notice that Karriere
contains in its collection of artworks a piece by Carl
Michael Von Haussfolff who was pals with Gysin. (pictured
left - photo by Von Hausswolff) Von Hausswolff
contributed his group Phauss’s footage of Alamut to
our movie Destroy All Rational Thought. I once
entertained him in my London apartment along with his
rather exhilarating wife Annika and that dude Andrew from
the Hafler Trio. I thought he was going to explode in
outrage but he survived the night. So it’s a small
world in many ways. And an endless frontier in another.
You mentioned a
book earlier on that you and Frank spent time working on,
when do you expect that to see the light of day?
The book Hashishin is due to
be published this year by Side Cartel and is exciting
because, in addition to a main text by myself and Frank
Rynne, it contains commentaries by Aleister Crowley,
Howard Marks, Gerard de Nerval, and other notorious
Hashishin.
The Cut Up`s powerful impact
has deeply infiltrated art within the manipulation of
sound and image. Performances such as this at the Karrier
Bar keep the Cut Up method lodged firmly in the heart of
popular and unpopular culture.
thanks to the
karrier bar and joe
..joe
http://www.joeambrose.net has recently had his extreme
travel writing book Hotel Chelsea Manhattan published on
headpress http://www.headpress.com/. He has been
published widely and this includes work of fiction and
non fiction, short stories, essays, pamphlets and
polemics.
The film destroy all rational
thought is available through screenedge
http://screenedge.com/
hashishin is due to be published
in 2008 by sidecartel http://www.sidecartel.com/
there are many sources of
information on culture jamming, sound art, cut up, here
are some;
sonic arts network
www.sonicartsnetwork.org
try the cut-up software at the
lazarus corporation
http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/v4/cutup/
the decapitator
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_decapitator/
abrupt
http://www.abrupt.org/index.html
the eec
http://evolution-control.com/culturejamming.html
ubu
http://www.ubu.com/papers/concannon.html
the church of the
subgeniushttp://www.subgenius.com/
rtmark http://rtmark.com/
paul hawkins for hesterglock
http://www.hesterglock.com