In 2014, IMT Gallery released a limited edition vinyl of all the “off-beat” moments–or moments in between interviewing dialogue–from a recorded interview between William S. Burroughs and journalist Roger Clarke. The This is a Game Called Hello, Hell, Here is X.X. project was led by Mark Rohtmaa Jackson, a co-founder of IMT Gallery, curator, and academic whose doctoral research was on sonic experimentation of William S. Burroughs. I interviewed Mark about the LP and the recordings for V Magazine Blog.
Because the LP focuses on the moments between dialogue, there’s a sparseness to the audio. This is why I felt the LP was a project that would benefit from additional context, and that was my goal going into this interview. You hear Burroughs go feed his fish. You hear a screen door opening. The interview helps to explain why such things are conceptually interesting and in sync with the philosophy of William S. Burroughs (to the extent that we might say there even exists such a thing).
My favourite moment from the interview is when Mark talked about the LP as “kind of like table tapping, or a séance,” a quality that was only heightened by the then-recent publication of Roger Clarke’s book Ghosts: A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof. I’m personally terrified of ghosts, so while this book looks fascinating, I’m afraid it’s one I’ll have to skip. The record was published by Laura Palookaville, a multiple sound art project founded by artist and architect Gordon Shrigley.
William S. Burroughs Audio
For curator Mark Jackson, assembling an LP of moments from William S. Burroughs’s 1995 interview with journalist Roger Clarke was an exercise of magic.
Mark Jackson is a London-based art curator who has spent over a decade of his life researching Beat icon William S. Burroughs. According to Jackson, the author, whom we love to remember for his avant-garde cut-up writing technique (a la The Soft Machine) and sympathetic, semi-autobiographical account of heroin users and pushers (a la Junky), had a life that extended far beyond the literary page into sound, Scientology, the supernatural, and Texas.
William S. Burroughs was a man of infinite complexity and prolific output—a fact well attested to by the legions of Burroughs scholars and biographers. Yet the vastness of Burroughs’s scholarship begs the question, What new things are left to be said about William S. Burroughs? To this question, Jackson has answered: How about nothing at all?
“This is a Game Called Hello, Hello, Here is X.X.” is a limited edition vinyl LP of one of William S. Burroughs’s last interviews with British journalist Roger Clarke in 1995. From seven hours of recorded material, Jackson has edited the vinyl to only include moments when the interview between Burroughs and Clarke had been suspended. In these gaps, we get to hear Burroughs at his most unguarded: taking Clarke to look for a rain stick, going outside to feed his fish (and tripping over something), pausing to prepare food.
“This is a Game Called Hello, Hello, Here is X.X” is a rare and unique depiction of Burroughs towards the end of his life. It is rich with the tenderness of Burroughs’s humanity yet still infused with the oddities and orgones we’ve come to associate with the Burroughsian spirit. Here, V talks to Jackson about the man and the myth behind the vinyl.
Nicole Sansone: How did you first start exploring the subject of William S. Burroughs and his tape experiments?
Mark Jackson: I was always interested in the way sound could be presented and interacted with in a practical, creative way, partly because I always relate it back to when I was a kid in the Middle East in the late 80s. You'd rent a VHS in the video store, and there would be loads of bits of the VHS that had been cut out because they offended religious or cultural sensibilities. So all this official sound material that I was getting as a child was being remixed for cultural purposes, and I thought that was really fascinating.
Then I was studying a Fine Art Media MA at the Slade School of Fine Art and I was very into some John Cage stuff, but also things like Napalm Death, the thrash metal band who had this really weird, earthy relationship to voice. I'd come across Burroughs previously, many years ago, I think as many people do as teenagers reading (or trying to read) Naked Lunch, and not being very successful. But my personal tutor at the Slade, Jon Thomson, suggested I revisit Burroughs and particularly that I look at the tape experiments.
So at this time I was working at art galleries in the center of town, and I would travel quite late on the train to and from these places, and I picked up [some of Burroughs’s] cut-up books...and they were amazing. They were really readable, despite the fact that they're supposed to be really difficult to read. When you’re reading the cut-up books on the Tube, you're reading about Venusian fish boys with translucent penises at the same time as doors are opening and people are getting on and off and somebody's music is playing over there, and you're kind of skipping back… And then, because of the way these cut-up books work, you might be reading about these translucent fish boys again, a couple of pages down, and you think Didn't I already read that? And it was just amazing to me.
NS: How did the idea for “This is a Game Called Hello, Hello, Here is X.X.” come about?
MJ: I was putting together an exhibition exploring William Burroughs and his tape experiments from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I'd heard that this guy Roger Clarke had some interesting Burroughs artifacts to look at. Roger knew Burroughs—well, he knew [Alan] Ginsberg especially, but through Ginsberg, he got to know Burroughs.
So I was talking to Roger, and Roger revealed that he interviewed William Burroughs back in 1995, two years before Burroughs' death, and that he [Roger] was one of the last British journalists to do so, and that he had these tapes of the interviews, and would I like to have a listen to them. It was kind of like a time capsule!
There were a few things on these tapes that were really interesting. One was that there's a long chat between Roger Clarke and James Grauerholz, Burroughs's agent, talking about the price of fame: being available on the telephone line and people knowing where Burroughs lives and young people coming round and feeling that they've got some kind of hold over him.
There were also these little bits of atmospheric noise that kept coming up. One of them was a huge amount of electrical noise that appeared on the tapes. There were also these little spaces, like the cacophony of annual cicadas in late summer Kansas. And then there were noises of Burroughs moving around his house, which was interesting just because I'd seen lots of media and photographic footage of Burroughs moving around his house, so I was kind of familiar with the layout, but hearing just the sound, and hearing Roger and Burroughs move around in this particular recording was quite interesting.
I thought it might be worthwhile to ask Roger if there was a way of editing small parts of these recordings, avoiding the conventional interview-interviewee narrative, to get more of a kind of atmospheric reading—an atmospheric presentation of Burroughs's house in Kansas.
NS: So, were you just following a hunch, or did you have a clear sense at a certain point that making this LP was an important thing to do for the legacy of William Burroughs?
MJ: On the one hand, it was a hunch. A lot of the things I'm doing, including curating exhibitions, is about starting with a hunch and seeing where it leads.
At the same time, there are a lot of things about Burroughs that are already out there, so trying to offer something new is quite important. I've been involved in researching Burroughs's relationship to sound for about ten years, now. That's a long time. Sounds ridiculous, right? So I feel I've got a really good sense of how sound was useful to Burroughs at various points in his life, for various purposes.
Burroughs does appear consistently throughout the history of contemporary popular music. Everyone from Iggy Pop singing Lust for Life, or the Klaxons… There are these completely disparate reference points to Burroughs in popular music, yet a lot of them don't really seem to latch on to Burroughs's really significant experimentations, these intellectual investigations, of sound. I wanted to put out something that was more in that vein. Not just a cut-up material, but something which pinpointed notes from these seven hours of recordings that Roger had made that had some resonance with Burroughs's interest in sound, particularly late-stage Burroughs.
NS: What can be gained by thinking about Burroughs sonically?
MJ: [Burroughs] is already a very sonic presence. His voice is very distinctive, and I think also the way he moves—everything with him is very distinctive.
The LP was kind of like table tapping, or a séance. Bringing in someone like Roger Clarke, who is a specialist in ghost hunting and has written his recent book about ghosts--having that connection was really interesting to me because this was, in a sense, trying to conjure Burroughs. And perhaps in these sounds around Burroughs that are less commonly exploited—these slight, subtle, interesting sounds, or these very banal sounds of Burroughs feeding the fish or opening the screen door—this all could maybe evoke Burroughs’s human presence as much as Burroughs the great literary behemoth that floats alongside him. There's some really good stuff on these seven hours of interview tapes, which was really difficult to not use in the final piece, but if they had been there, it would have, again, evoked this behemoth, rather than Burroughs the person.
The LP felt like an extension of this, of trying to raise Burroughs from the dead, of trying to raise his voice through this old, archaic, audio technology. Going from magnetic tape to a digital file to an LP felt like a bit of that process in the electronic voice phenomenon, where you try to hear the voice of the dead through radio noise. It kind of felt like we were subtly going through various processes and he would magically manifest...It was an exercise of magic.
NS: What's your favourite moment on the record?
MJ: I really love some of the electronic, mechanical noise that comes in occasionally. It’s partly because I've never seen the tape machine that Roger recorded the interview on, and as a bit of a fetishist, I kind of like to imagine that tape machine. It's almost like the third man in the room, the guest that nobody's talking about, but who's actually an incredibly important part of the conversation
NS: What were the parts of the interview that were the hardest to cut from the LP?
MJ: There are bits where [Burroughs and Clarke] talk about ghosts, there are also noises when Burroughs is rapping on a surface, and they're talking about haunted houses. There are also points when they talk about spirits in machines and things that seem really appropriate, but I think it would have jarred with what the record was supposed to be doing.
NS: What do you hope this LP leaves in terms of the legacy of Burroughs?
MJ: One of the things that I'm quite pleased with about the LP is I feel like it's an appropriate record in response to Burroughs and my research with the tape experiments. I think the LP is a beautiful evocation of a kind of time, a certain environment: there are aspects of that recording that really pick up that Kansas, late summer environment in the mid-'90s. I think there's something about Roger's very distinctive, English, public school-educated voice, and Burroughs's south, you know his U.S., uh...what's the word, um...
NS: Southern drawl?
MJ: Drawl! Yeah. It's just an interesting environment to listen to. I'm excited about the LP being something that's listened to as a cultural oddity. And we've done it in such a way that there are these silences in between individual tracks, so you can put the LP on and it'll kind of sit in the background, and then suddenly a sound will come on. It'll just contribute to an environment an otherness or oddness that might not have been there before. So that's what I hope for it.
“This is a game called ‘Hello, Hello, Here is X.X.” is an edition of 200 and is available to order on Amazon for £29.99. The record is published by Laura Palookaville, a multiple sound art projects founded by the artist Gordon Shrigley. Listen to the trailer, above. A launch event will be held at London’s IMT Gallery on Saturday, November 8th at 6 PM.
