I took Brian Jones up to the mountain to record with Uhers, and Ornette Coleman to spend $25,000 in a week to record next to nothing on Nagras and Stellavox, but I have to admit that the most adventurous sounds we ever made were done with old Reveres and hundred dollar Japanese boxes we fucked around with, William and I and Ian Sommerville. I got hold of the BBC facilities for the series of sound poems I did with them in 1960, technically still the best, naturally. I had originally been led to believe that I would have a week and it turned out to be only three days that we had, so in a very hurried way at the end I started cutting up a spoken text-I think the illustration of how the Cut-ups work, "Cut-ups Self Explained"-and put it several times through their electronic equipment, and arrived at brand new words that had never been said, by me or by anybody necessarily, onto the tape. William had pushed things that far through the typewriter. I pushed them that far through the tapeworld. But the experiment was withdrawn very quickly there, I mean, it was . . . time was up and they were made rather nervous by it, they were quite shocked by the results that were coming back out of the speakers and were only too glad to bring the experiment to an end. ["Well, what did they expect? A chorus of angels with tips on the stock market?"-William Burroughs) "The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin" (as put through a computer by Ian Sommerville) was broadcast by the BBC, produced by Douglas Cleverdon. ("Achieving the second lowest rating of audience approval registered by their poll of listeners"-BG) Some of the early cut-up tape experiments are now available: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1959-1980) LP (IR 0016) available on the Industrial Records label from Rough Trade, 137 Blenheim Crescent, London W11, England.]

What we did on our own was to play around with the very limited technology and wattage we had in the old Beat Hotel, 40-watts a room was all we were allowed. There is something to be said for poverty, it makes you more inventive, it's more fun and you get more mileage out of what you've got plus your own ingenuity. When you handle the stuff yourself, you get the feel of it. William loved the idea of getting his hands on his own words, branding them and rustling anyone else's he wanted. It's a real treat for the ears, too, the first time you hear it . . . made for dog whistles, after that. Hey Rube! - the old carny circus cry for men working the sideshows when they saw some ugly provincial customer coming up on them after they had rooked him . . . Hey Rube! - a cry to alert all the carny men to a possible rumble . . . Hey-ba ba-Rube-ba! - Salt Peanuts and the rude sound coming back so insistent again and again that you know the first bar of Bebop when you hear it. Right or wrong, Burroughs was fascinated because he must have listened to plenty of bebop talk from Kerouac, whom I never met. He must have been a fascinating character, too bad to miss him like that, when I was thrown up against all the rest of this Beat Generation. Maybe I was lucky. I remember trying to avoid them all after Paul Bowles had written me: "I can't understand their interest in drugs and madness." Then, I dug that he meant just the contrary. Typical. He did also write me to get closer to Burroughs whom I had cold-shouldered . . . until he got off the junk in Paris.

T: Who produced the "Poem of Poems" through the tape recorder? The text in The Third Mind is ambiguous.
B: I did. I made it to show Burroughs how, possibly, to use it. William did not yet have a tape recorder. First, I had "accidentally" used "pisspoor material,"fragments cut out of the press which I shored up to make new and original texts, unexpectedly. Then, William had used his own highly volatile material, his own inimitable texts which he submitted to cuts, unkind cuts, of the sort that Gregory Corso felt unacceptable to his own delicate "poesy." William was always the toughest of the lot. Nothing ever fazed him. So I suggested to William that we should use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the Song of Songs of Solomon, Eliot's translation of Anabase by St. John Perse, Shakespeare's sugar'd Sonnets and a few lines from The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley about his mescaline experiences.

Very soon after that, Burroughs was busy punching to death a series of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he applied himself with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a matter of weeks, days even. At the same time he was punching his way through a number of equally cheap plastic typewriters, using two very stiff forefingers . . . with enormous force. He could punch a machine into oblivion. That period in the Beat Hotel is best illustrated by that photo of William, wearing a suit and tie as always, sitting back at this table in a very dingy room. On the wall hangs a nest of three wire trays for correspndence which I gave him to sort out his cut-up pages. Later, this proliferated into a maze of filing cases filling a room with manuscripts cross-referenced in a way only Burroughs could work his way through, more by magic dowsing than by any logical system. how could there be any? This was a magic practice he was up to, surprising the very springs of creative imagination at their source. I remember him muttering that his manuscripts were multiplying and reproducing themselves like virus at work. It was all he could do to keep up with them. Those years sloughed off one whole Burroughs archive whose catalogue alone is a volume of 350 pages. Since then several tons of Burroughs papers have been moved to the Burroughs Communication Centre in Lawrence, Kansas. And he is still at it.

T: The cut-up techniques made very explicit a preoccupation with exorcism - William's texts became spells, for instance. How effective are methods such as street playback of tapes for dispersing parasites?
B: We-e-ell, you'd have to ask William about that, but I do seem to remember at least two occasions on which he claimed success . . .

Uh, the first was in the Beat Hotel still, therefore about 1961 or '2, and William decided (laughing) to "take care" of an old lady who sold newspapers in a kiosk, and this kiosk was rather dramatically and strategically placed at the end of the street leading out of the rue Git le Coeur toward the Place Saint Michel, and, uh, you whent up a flight of steps and then under an archway and as you came out you were spang! in front of this little old French lady who looked as if she'd been there since-at least since the French Revolution-when she had been knitting at the foot of the guillotine, and she lived in a layer of thickly matted, padded newspapers hanging around her piled very sloppily, and, uh, she was of absolutely incredible malevolence, and the only kiosk around there at that time that sold the Herald-Tribune, so that William (chuckling) found that he was having to deal with her every day, and every day she would find some new way to aggravate him, some slight new improvement on her malevolent insolence and her disagreeable lack of . . . uh (chuckling) collaboration with William in the buying of his newspaper (laughter). . .

So . . one day the little old lady burnt up inside her kiosk. And we came out to find that there was just the pile of ashes on the ground. William was . . . slightly conscience-stricken, but nevertheless rather satisfied with the result (laughter) as it proved the efficacity of his methods, but a little taken aback, he didn't necessarily mean the old lady to burn up inside there . . . And we often talked about this as we sat in a cafe looking at the spot where the ashes still were, for many months later . . . and to our great surprise and chagrin one day we saw a very delighted Oriental boy-I think probably Vietnamese- digging in these ashes with his hands and pulling out a whole hatful of money, of slightly blackened coins but a considerable sum, and (laughing) we would have been very glad to have it too - just hadn't thought of digging in the thing, so I said: "William, I don't think your operation was a complete success." And he said: "I am very glad that that beautiful young Oriental boy made this happy find at the end of the rainbow . . ."

T: She consummated her swell purpose . . .
B: (Laughing) Exactly . . . exactly . . . (chuckling)

Now the other case was some years later in London when he had perfected the method and, uh, went about with at least one I think sometimes two tape recorders, one in each hand, with prerecorded, um-runes-what did you call them? You said William's things-

T: Spells.
B: Spells, okay, spells.
T: Like-
B: (chanting)
Lock them out and bar the door,
Lock them out for e-v-e-rmore.
Nook and cranny windo door
Seal them out for e-v-e-rmore
Lock them out and block the rout
Shut them scan them flack them out.
Lock is mine and door is mine
Three times three to make up nine . . .
Curse go back curse go back
Back with double pain and lack
Curse go back - back

Et cetera . . . yeah . . . pow . . . "Shift, cut, tangle word lines" . . . sure . . .

Well, that was for the Virus Board, wasn't it, that he was gonna destroy the Virus Board . . .

Brion Gysin died in 1986.