I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing and for
the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the
greatest songwriters in pop music from Lennon to Bowie from Bolan to Cobain.
I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like
Bowie and Mark Bolan in fact many of the great guitar players had techniques
that you could look at some form of trickery. In fact if you look at technology
and what it can do creating an illusion of sound and vision that in itself is a
form of trickery as it is certainly not reality.
I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking and that
some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of that into another mode of
thinking and cutup is a good example of this. We often see this as a series of
phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers and put together in
a random form which then weirdly makes sense poetically however William S
Burroughs did more.
In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be
termed as cutup for instance going outside and recording the sounds that you
hear in the street in fact snatches of conversation that are put together out
of time was one of Burroughs’s techniques. Also just flipping between TV
channels or radio stations, taking parts of blogs and putting them together any
these techniques will be the basis of cutup.
When I was explaining this technique once at a blues camp
summer school somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble
that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that somebody had listened to
over the years have actually been some form of fraud. This is one of the
elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. There is a strange phenomenon
when something unusual happens that there is an element of fraud that seems to
go with it even when it is not necessary because the event is weird enough in
itself. An interesting case in point was that the Enfield poltergeist the event
was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some
untruths which make the whole situation seem unreal. What is interesting about
this story is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied
about certain elements as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her
mind. And this is quite common in fact there is a book written about the
trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very
malleable.
Because of this often Fortean type events are often thought
of as frauds when in actual fact the event itself was real but some other sort
of fraud or economic use of the facts accompany the event.
My use of cutup has been really creative in my experience
and I suggest that you try these and see what results you get. When I work with
this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe
because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked gives rise to these very
strange effects. Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique
very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not they often lived
lives that seem very unreal to us in the mundane world but I think that this is
one of the true areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by
using this simple technique.
Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk
be creative for three days