Re: [microsound] eno

[The pHarmanaut <pharmanaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, Burroughs did collaborate with Laurie Anderson, both on the previously
mentioned "home of the brave" as well as on "Sharkey's Night", the last cut
on 1984's Mr. Heartbreak album. Burroughs collaborated ith Waits on "The
Black Rider" not "Bone Machine." "The Black Rider" is a great album, and you
get to hear Burroughs sing, a real treat, though of course not by any
stretch microsound. This was a score to a play by Robert Wilson, an homage
to German Expressionism ... great, dark, fairy tale expanses of evil in this
one. Then of course there are the Burroughs CDs, "Dead City Radio" (collabs
with John Cale, Sonic Youth, Donald Fagen(!), and others) and "Spare Ass
Annie" (collabs with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy).

But I really had in mind the cut-up stuff, the tape and film and text
experiments that Burroughs was doing more of in the 1960s than the 1950s.
There's a great CD of the stuff he was doing with Ian Sommerville--cut-ups,
drop-ins, and backward-masking stuff. Probably not really microsound in
orientation but certainly glitch. The CD is called "Break Through in Grey
Room" and came out on the Sub Rosa label in 1986. Some of the recordings
here are more compelling than the entirity of "The Soft Machine", "Nova
Express", and "The Ticket that Exploded" (the latter being THE book to read,
I think). Certainly, this trilogy outlines a literary equivalent of the
glitch as well as click-and-cut (though maybe clip-and-cut would be better)
aesthetic: exploring flaws, intentional mismatches, rough cuts as a way to
discover unintended lines of association.

Cheers,
-=Trace