The Electronic Revolution has been announced (and published) decades before its digital offspring. William S. Burrough's text on ...well... many things, one of which is the tactical use of consumer electronics, published in 1970, still goes down as one of the most insightful possibility vectors for the strategic abuse of sound, crowds and technology. Biba Kopf sketches the influence of William S Burroughs on the Industrial culture of the late 70s. The following text is an extract from an article in The Wire (issue 164). It was first published in October 1997. Interviews by Biba Kopf.

A few days after the news of the death of William S Burroughs spread like a virus through the mutterlines of the mass media, Richard H Kirk comments on the impact of Burroughs's work on the music he made in the late 70s with Stephen Mallinder and Christopher Watson in Cabaret Voltaire. "A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music," he says. "One book in particular, The Electronic Revolution, was an influence on us."

Compared to a novel such as The Naked Lunch, The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970, is a virtual samizdat text, but for musicians like Kirk it pointed the way to a new methodology. "It was almost a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd," he explains, "to promote a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself. That side was always very interesting to us."
In both The Electronic Revolution and The Job (1970), Burroughs mapped strategies for the use of tape recorders as instruments of psychic terrorism. The books include instructions. One reads: "[The use of the tape recorder] as a long range weapon to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media: The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken. . . You can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the street with a tape recorder. . . So stir in news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, adverts and put the altered mutter line."

Inspired by such notions, the tape recorder was a major weapon in Cabaret Voltaire's armoury in the early days of the information war they carried out, alongside Throbbing Gristle and other groups associated with the Industrial movement, in the late 70s.
Similarly, their use of split screen film projections, intercutting horror, porn, military and domestic images, were inspired by Burroughs's and Brion Gysin's collage methods, and the cut-up movies Burroughs made with British film-maker Anthony Balch. Most importantly, Cabaret Voltaire adapted for sound Burroughs's use of cut-ups as a weapon against the all-pervasive, if nefarious Control. As Burroughs once put it: "The word is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspapers, and images as well... Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system."

"We only tried it out in live situations," remarks Richard H Kirk drily. Not all audiences were receptive to messengers delivering dystopian visions compounded from cut-up tapes, noise, brute rhythm and disturbing imagery. An early concert in Sheffield ended in a riot, during which bassist Stephen Mallinder suffered a chipped vertebrae. Though not without danger, the response proved the efficacy of the method. The first three Cabaret Voltaire albums, Mix Up, Voice Of America and Red Mecca, are still outstanding examples of pre-sampler mixology with intent to hurt.

The Final Academy took place in October 1982, featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, Last Few Days and 23 Skidoo. As described by Genesis P-Orridge, one of its main instigators: "William, Brion and the poet John Giorno used writing because in their day writing was the most vital living form of propaganda [. . .] Now you've got groups like Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, The Last Few Days and Psychic TV who have followed through and used tape, cut-ups, random chats and sound exactly in the way they've read or least been inspired by Burroughs's and Gysin's books. They've put it, though, into popular culture, into music, which happens at the moment to be the most vital form." The shared obsessions of participants included control, de-control, re-evaluation and recognition.

Control in the Burroughs mythology of things was/is a nefarious, ill-defined body all the more impossible to spot because the organs of control now control the controllers: "It's got to that strange stage now where Control exists separate of anyone," P-Orridge said. "I don't think anyone controls Control anymore. [...] You can't pick the enemy off because nobody knows where it is. It has become self-perpetuating, a force in itself. So you must go right back to square one. The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."

Inspired by the tape experiments Burroughs had made with Sommerville and Gysin, P-Orridge and former TG/PTV partner Peter Christopherson, now of Coil, approached Burroughs with the idea of sifting his archives to collate an album of his tape experiments. It was eventually released on Industrial Records in 1981as Nothing Here Now But The Recordings. "It was very much a labour of love, because Burroughs had been so influential to me personally and, I think, to Gen too," says Christopherson. "For me, he was the writer who first showed me that it was possible to have moral and philosophical systems that were outside the norm, the accepted norm of society, that were workable and meaningful.
Although it did have a lot to do with sexuality, at the same time it was also to do with politics, relationships, everything. His entire existence was outside, it was beyond the pale, and the fact that he could live it and he could write about it was incredibly influential. So the idea of doing a record of his work was just fantastic, the best thing I could possibly think of doing.

"Obviously, Throbbing Gristle were attempting to popularise or make accessible ideas that would otherwise have gone unnoticed," continues Christopherson. "There was a tremendous amount of conscious playing with what people's preconceptions might be. We were taking audiences who thought they were coming to a regular gig quite a long way from what they were expecting; even people who thought they knew Throbbing Gristle hopefully had experiences that were quite substantially different from what they were expecting. I think that was one of the reasons that we were constantly changing, trying to do things differently, because we wanted to break people's conceptions and understanding of what was going on. In that sense, using Burroughsian techniques was perfectly justified."

Copyright The Wire 1997. Reproduced by permission. The Wire can be contacted by
e-mail: the_wire@ukonline.co.uk
website: http://www.dfuse.com/the-wire

Biba Kopf [the_wire@ukonline.co.uk]