Bill Laswell |
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Mon. June 22.1998 3:00 AM EDT |
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Laswell And Burroughs Just A Pair Of Cut-UpsUber-producer Bill Laswell makes sonic sense of Beat writer William Burroughs' cut-and-paste methodology. by Contributing Editor Kembrew McLeod |
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Producer Laswell's sonic excursions have touched on world music, electronic ambiance and more. ( ) |
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When the recently deceased Beat writer William Burroughs first got the
idea to use scissors and tape to rearrange and recontextualize his
writing in such books as "Naked Lunch" back in the 1950s, little did he
know he would help pioneer the
One current beneficiary of the writer's experiments, mega-producer Bill Laswell recently employed the same technique to pull Burroughs' own spoken words into a new recording, The Road to Western Lands. The matching of the left-field producer and the groundbreaking writer (not the first time they've crossed sonic paths) would seem a natural one. "He was a complete original," 48-year-old Laswell said of Burroughs. "He embodied the adventurous experimentation of the Beat era and helped reformulate and reshape the way in which people make sense of the world. His cut-up method was important in working to do away with the linear narratives that have been so much a part of Western literature and music." Laswell creates music with a similarly open mind to chance, randomness and unexpected juxtapositions. His work with other artists and as a solo artist is marked by a willingness to step past the bounds of musical convention, as typified by the collaboration of his "metal" band Praxis and San Francisco-based turntablists Invisibl Skratch Piklz on last year's Transmutation Live album. Most recently, Laswell applied the same cut-and-paste approach to the making of Panthalassa, in which he collaged numerous electric-era Miles Davis tracks into a new full-length CD. This approach, incidentally, wasn't foreign to Davis. In fact, according to Seth Rothstein, the Miles Davis reissue project director at Columbia Records, Davis and his producer, Teo Macero, often would splice together bits and pieces of his concert performances to produce his live albums. Laswell, as it happens, is simply the latest in a long line of innovators willing to push the sonic envelope. Laswell has built a comparable reputation for originality -- and versatility -- in the music world. Since his first work with Material in 1979, Laswell has participated in recording more than 250 albums. As a solo artist, producer, bandleader and record label owner, he has been responsible for some of the most interesting fusions of world music, funk, punk, hip-hop, rock, pop and jazz in the past 20 years. His collaboration with Herbie Hancock on 1983's Grammy-winning "Rockit" was the first top 40 hit to incorporate DJ turntable scratching. He has collaborated with free-jazz legends Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brotzmann, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker, P-Funkateers George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, hip-hop innovators Afrika Bambaataa and the Jungle Brothers and even a pre-superstar singer Whitney Houston. In the mid-1980s, Laswell went on to produce major-label albums by Mick Jagger, PIL, Iggy Pop and Yoko Ono. The core of the recently released The Road to Western Lands pairs Burroughs' voice with Laswell's group Material on remixed versions of "The Western Lands" (RealAudio excerpts of Material and DJ Soul Slinger versions), a song originally recorded for Material's Seven Souls album in 1989, and which was rereleased this year by Triloka. The Road to Western Lands consists of five remixes of "The Western Lands" and two mixes of "Seven Souls." The remixes are by Material (in cahoots with DJ Spooky) and four of today's most prominent fusion-friendly mixologists. British Asian Underground ringleader and producer Talvin Singh, N.Y.C. drum-and-bass stalwart DJ Soul Slinger, arty drum-and-bass pioneers Spring Heel Jack and Illbient scenester DJ Olive, all contributed wildly varying versions of "The Western Lands" that reflect the spirit of Burroughs' cut-up method. Burroughs, who was born in 1914 and died last year, was no stranger to audio collaborations. He first began to extend his cut-up method to audio tape when he worked with his friend Brion Gysin in the late 1950s. By cutting and pasting found sounds, taped voices and street noises in the same way he rearranged sentences, paragraphs and chapters in books, Burroughs, with Gysin, assisted in pioneering a primitive version of the sampling aesthetic that more contemporary artists such as Negativland, John Oswald and Beck later would perfect. Burroughs collaborated with Sonic Youth, John Cale and Blondie member Chris Stein on 1990's Dead City Radio, and later with the late grunge pioneer and Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain and Spearhead frontman Michael Franti on The "Priest" They Called Him and Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, respectively. Material later collaborated with Burroughs on the song "Words of Advice" from Material's 1994 album, Hallucination Engine. "The 'Western Lands' recording is pretty old ... it was originally released in the late 1980s," Laswell said. "But I wanted to give it new life by handing it over to people I've worked with and knew would do a good job of capturing what Burroughs tried to achieve in his work." On every version of "The Western Lands," each remixer radically reworked the original text. For instance, the Talvin Singh track retains Burroughs' voice, albeit in an echoed and slightly distorted form, and makes Burroughs sound at home among an array of electronic blips, beeps and beats. Aside from reading a book or two, Talvin Singh wasn't very familiar with Burroughs when he was pulled into the project by Laswell. "Musically, it's difficult to work with spoken word because you have to be sensitive to it," 28-year-old Singh said. "You're just given text and the voice. That's what I was given at first, so I just built music around it that retained his voice, was interesting and which was sensitive to what his vibe was all about." On the other hand, during DJ Olive's deconstruction job, Burroughs' voice barely survives -- it is alternately slowed down, rearranged and sometimes absent from the spacy, swirling mix that is held together with a mid-tempo beat. The introduction to Soul Slinger's remix electronically treats his voice almost beyond recognition and places it within a blanket of drum-and-bass beats. Meanwhile, Spring Heel Jack does away with the beats altogether. Perhaps having a bunch of people come along and chop one's work to pieces may upset some artists, but Laswell guesses Burroughs won't be rolling in his grave anytime soon. To the contrary, Laswell said, "He'd be pleased." |
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