DESCRIPTION:
From the Industrial Records album "Nothing Here But The Recordings" (1981); label managed by Throbbing Gristle (Cosey Fanni Tutti, Genesis P-Orridge, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, Chris Carter). IR0016 very rare album.

About This Track:
Hassan Sabbah "The Old Man Of The Mountain" was the leader of a fanatical fraternity in the eleventh century A.D. that lent its name, the "hashasheen" to the concept of assassination. His base was a castle on the Mount Almut in Norther Persia. This text by William S. Burroughs is an explanation of a section in Nova Express written and read onto tape in the Empress Hotel, London 1960-1961. This hotel has since been demolished. The tape was intended to illustrate a condition of advanced paranoia. Brion Gysin has visited Mount Alamout, now a ruin.

Also contains perhaps the very first instance of the term 'heavy metal'.

The recordings on this album have been selected from a large number of reel to reel and cassette tapes stored in the William S. Burroughs Communications Archive in Kansas. Most of the tapes were made on domestic recorders and on some there was large-scale physical deterioration. Hi-Fi quality was impossible and the sound varies considerably.

It is important also to understand that these are not recordings of his readings of prose, nor were they intended when they were made to be seen as finished "works" or art. The participants were thinking about alterations and the potentialities of the tape-recorder. These are primarily notes on experiments with recording and playback techniques that were first initiated by Brion Gysin in Room number 25, 9 Rue Git le Coeur, Paris in 1959 as he applied his Cut-up principle to different media.

The whole Cut-up procedure was Brion Gysin's conception and it was he who did the first tape-recorder experiment taking material from magazines and newspapers and cutting them in at random on a UHER machine. A surprising number of intersections were meaningful and the piece asa whole seemed quite coherent. William S. Burroughs was working closely with Brion Gysin and acquired his own tape-recorder shortly afterwards. In London in the very early sixties he began his own research with his close friend Ian Sommerville operating a great deal of the technical side of it. It was also Ian Sommerville who often initiated electronic effects and the use of cassette recorders, multiple recorders and street recordings.

When you cut-up and rearrange words, new words emerge, the future leaks through, seemingly at random. New words and altered meanings are implicit in cutting-up but how random is random?

About William S. Burroughs:
William Seward Burroughs was born on the 5h of February 1934 in Saint Louis, U.S.A. and is most famous for the many books he has written over the last thirty years. He has made investigation of communication and the internal and external qualities and effects of words in particular his domain. His work within the medium of books and articles has been vastly influential internationally in all creative spheres, but in many ways his far less available theoretical and philosophical experiments could well prove to be far more crucial and revelationary as time passes. Control and its application rely most consistently throughout history upon linear, rigid structures, more often than not operated by words. In his theories and tape experiments William S. Burroughs challenges the very nature and power of words and then goes on to distort, mutate and rearrange them in order to reveal both their disease and its non-linear anti-dote. William S. Burroughs has taken risks in every aspect of his life and left a legacy, part of which is here if you listen attentively, which is a pointer to the direction thought, philosophy and activity must take to continue to expand.