Pre-existing material sliced apart and reassembled; the form whose downstream into the genre this archive otherwise covers is the most direct of any in this department.
The cut-up is the form of compositional method whose core operation is the slicing of pre-existing material into fragments and the reassembly of those fragments into new arrangements. The premise is that the original arrangement was hiding something; the cut and reassembly forces the hidden material into the open. Burroughs put the proposition memorably: "when you cut into the present, the future leaks out." The form began as a literary technique, was extended to magnetic tape within months of its discovery, then to film and photograph, then to any medium with an arrangement that could be sliced. Its propagation into the genre this archive otherwise covers is more direct than that of any other form here; the post-1976 industrial tradition's method is the cut-up applied to studio-recorded sound.
The founding event was an accident in a cheap Paris hotel room in September 1959. The Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, in the 6th arrondissement, was a family pension run by Madame Rachou; from 1957 to 1963 it housed the Beat Generation's Paris contingent, including Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, Harold Norse and the engineer Ian Sommerville. Brion Gysin had just returned to Paris from Tangier and was working on a series of calligraphic paintings he called écritures; he was mounting one of these on the desk of room 15 and had placed several layers of newspaper underneath as a cutting mat. He ran his Stanley razor blade through the stack to size the paper and noticed that the cuts had produced unexpected text fragments where the columns from different newspapers crossed. He picked the fragments up and started reassembling them; the results, he wrote later, made him laugh so hard "my neighbours thought I'd flipped." Burroughs returned to the hotel from London later that month, Gysin showed him the technique and within nine months Minutes to Go (Two Cities Editions, Paris, 1960) appeared as the form's founding publication, jointly authored by Burroughs, Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso.
The form's literary phase is conventionally dated 1959 to 1965 and centred on what Burroughs called the Cut-Up Trilogy or Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine (Olympia Press, Paris, 1961), The Ticket That Exploded (Olympia Press, 1962), and Nova Express (Grove Press, New York, 1964). Across these three novels Burroughs developed the cut-up not just as a generative technique but as a theoretical instrument: the method by which he believed the implicit content of mass-media language could be exposed, the manipulative structures of advertising and propaganda made visible and what he called the "word virus" inoculated against. Burroughs wrote the form's central essay, "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin," in 1963; the essay names Tristan Tzara's 1920 hat-poem as predecessor, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) as "the first great cut-up collage", and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36) as further antecedent. The cross-reference back to F·04 Dada is filed at defining status; the cut-up is in part Tzara's hat-poem mechanised and turned into a method.
I took a Stanley blade and cut through them; the bits looked so amusing I started jiggling them around. Brion Gysin, on the discovery, room 15, Beat Hotel, September 1959
The form's technological extension is the part of its history that matters most to this archive. The literary cut-up is portable, the hardware is a razor blade and the method does not require a studio; this is what made the form propagate forward. The cut-up extended to magnetic tape in the early 1960s through the work of Ian Sommerville, the English mathematician and engineer who became Burroughs' "systems advisor" and partner at the Beat Hotel. Sommerville (1940 to 1976) had the technical capacity Burroughs lacked: he could splice tape, reverse it, slow it, layer it and record the results as deliberate compositions. The Burroughs-Sommerville tape work from 1961 onward is the methodological hinge between the cut-up's literary phase and its post-1976 propagation into recorded music. Sommerville also co-invented the Dreamachine with Gysin in 1961, the rotating cylinder with light-bulb interior that produces stroboscopic visions when viewed with closed eyes; the device is the visual analogue of the cut-up technique, applied to the optical apparatus of the brain.
The Burroughs and Sommerville and Gysin collaboration extended further into film through the work of Antony Balch (1937 to 1980), the British filmmaker who collaborated with Burroughs on a series of cut-up films across the 1960s: Towers Open Fire (1963), the unfinished documentary project Guerrilla Conditions (filmed 1961–65), The Cut-Ups (1967), Bill and Tony (1972), and The Junky's Christmas (1966). The Cut-Ups opened at the Cinephone cinema on Oxford Street in London in 1967 and produced a documented audience reaction: many audience members reported nausea, others demanded refunds, others walked out muttering "it's disgusting." The film cuts up its own footage by editorial procedure rather than by narrative; the technique that worked on the page worked on the screen too.
The form's most consequential synchronicity is filed at the editorial-fact level. Ian Sommerville was killed in a car crash on Burroughs' sixty-second birthday, 5 February 1976, age thirty-six. The date is the same calendar date as Cabaret Voltaire opens in F·04 (5 February 1916), exactly sixty years apart; the coincidence is unforced. Within two months of Sommerville's death the post-1976 industrial tradition this archive otherwise covers had begun: Throbbing Gristle's first public performance at the ICA was 18 October 1976; the original lineup of the form's downstream practitioners was already being assembled in Sheffield, Brixton and elsewhere through the previous year. The hinge between the form's discoverers and the form's industrial inheritors is about eight months wide; this is unusually short for a form-to-genre transition.
The form's industrial inheritance is documented in direct citations. Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire stated in interview that "the manipulation of sound in our early days, the physical act of cutting up tapes, creating tape loops and all that, has a strong reference to Burroughs and Gysin"; the Sheffield band's tape-collage method from 1973 onward is the cut-up applied to industrial source material. Genesis P-Orridge sustained a personal friendship with Burroughs and Gysin from the late 1970s onward, cited Burroughs in print repeatedly through the TG and Psychic TV catalogues and brought Burroughs onto Psychic TV recordings directly. Coil's method (Christopherson and Balance) was structurally cut-up procedures applied to ritual, esoteric and electronic source material; the Coil catalogue cites Gysin's Dreamachine repeatedly. Clock DVA's research-project mode, particularly across the era II catalogue (Buried Dreams, Man-Amplified), is cut-up methodology in cyberpunk dress. Al Jourgensen of Ministry has cited Burroughs as the most important influence on his approach to sampling. The form propagated forward into a genre, became invisible there and is now infrastructural to electronic music's method generally.
The form's continuing development through the late twentieth century paralleled the rise of digital media. Burroughs' "image bank" concept from the 1960s anticipated the database structures that later digital practice would formalise; the cut-up's working assumption (that any recorded material can be sliced, reassembled and made to mean differently) is structurally identical to the operating principle of the sampler, the digital audio workstation and the contemporary practice of remix as a category. The Third Mind, Burroughs and Gysin's joint summary book of the form, was published in 1977 and 1978 in two different versions; the title refers to the entity that emerges when two minds collaborate on cut-up work, which neither alone would have produced. The post-1976 industrial tradition's method, the contemporary modular synthesiser scene's practice of granular synthesis, the entirety of sample-based hip-hop and electronic dance music and the contemporary practice of internet culture all run downstream of the cut-up. The form is everywhere; the credit is rarely paid.
What this file argues for, finally, is why that directness holds where other forms' did not. Where F·01 musique concrète propagated forward through broadcast studios, where F·02 elektronische Musik propagated through laboratory equipment, where F·03 Italian Futurism and F·04 Dada propagated through manifestos and survived more in argument than in apparatus, the cut-up propagated forward through a single physical operation that any practitioner could perform with hardware-shop tools. The razor blade was the method; the razor blade survived the founders. The Bureau files the form at F·05 because by 1976 the form had become invisible in the way that infrastructure becomes invisible; the post-1976 industrial catalogue did not need to cite Burroughs because Burroughs was already the substrate.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Restoration · last revised c. the Pleistocene era