During his lifetime Brion Gysin (1916-1986) inspired an array of artists, writers, poets and musicians, notably the Beat Generation. Since his death Gysin's own work has only increased in popularity, yet his radical approach to art defies categorization. Dream Machine is the first detailed study of Gysin's œuvre in both art-historical and contemporary contexts. A devotee of invention, Gysin created paintings, drawings, photo-collages, installations, poetry and sound experiments. He produced the cut-up collage novel The Third Mind (1965) with William Burroughs, and with Ian Sommerville developed the Dreamachine (1961), a kinetic sculpture designed to induce visions by playing flickering light on the closed eyes of the viewer. This exciting new book, featuring incisive texts, a photo essay, and appreciations by contemporary artists, captures the remarkable daring of an artistic visionary.

Brion Gysin (1916-86) has been an incredibly influential artist and iconoclast: his development of the "cut-up" technique with William S. Burroughs has inspired generations of writers, artists and musicians. Gysin was also a skilled networker and revered expat: together with his friend Paul Bowles, he more or less constructed the post-beatnik romanticism for life and magic in Morocco, and was also a protagonist in an international gay culture with inspirational reaches in both America and Europe. Not surprisingly, Gysin has become something of a cult figure. One of the artists he inspired is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who collaborated with both Gysin and Burroughs in the 1970s, during his work with Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions. The interviews made by P-Orridge have since become part of a New Wave/Industrial mythos. This volume presents them in their entirety alongside three texts on Gysin by P-Orridge, plus an introduction. This book is an exclusive insight into the mind of a man P-Orridge describes as "a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the last century," and a fantastic complement to existing biographies and monographs.

The first anthology of writings by the brilliant avant-gardist: “A valuable book that makes accessible an artist too long considered a cult-eccentric.” —Publishers Weekly Born in 1916, Brion Gysin was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and experimental poet credited with the discovery of the “cut-up” technique—a collage of texts, not pictures—which his longtime collaborator William S. Burroughs put to more extensive use. He is also considered one of the early innovators of sound poetry, which he defined as “getting poetry back off the page and into performance.” Back in No Time gathers materials from the entire Gysin oeuvre: scholarly historical study, baroque fiction, permutated and cut-up poetry, unsettling memoir, selections from The Process and The Last Museum, and his unproduced screenplay of Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch. In addition, this reader contains complete texts of several Gysin pieces that are difficult to find, including “Poem of Poems,” “The Pipes of Pan,” and “A Quick Trip to Alamut.”

Interviews and writings with and by W.S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and members of Throbbing Gristle. Heavily illustrated and with reference lists from each interviewee: book lists, audio and other recommendations.

The multimedia artist, poet and novelist Brion Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of.Gysin (1916–1986) was an English-born, Canadian-raised, naturalized American of Swiss descent, who lived most of his life in Morocco and France. He went everywhere when the going was good. He dabbled with surrealism in Paris in the 1930s, lived in the “interzone” of Tangier in the 1950s and traveled the Algerian Sahara with Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles before moving into the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. Gysin’s ideas influenced generations of artists, musicians and writers, among them David Bowie, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Genesis P-Orridge, John Giorno and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. None was touched more profoundly than William S. Burroughs, who said admiringly of Gysin: “There was something dangerous about what he was doing. ”It was Gysin who introduced the Rolling Stones to the exotica of Morocco and took Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones to Jajouka where he recorded the tribal musicians performing the Pipes of Pan. It was Gysin who provided the hashish fudge recipe published in Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook, promising “ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes.” It was Gysin who introduced Burroughs to an automatic writing method called the cut-up, a literary progenitor to sampling. And it was Gysin who developed—with Ian Sommerville, the Dream Machine—a device that allowed people, with the flick of a switch, to access altered states of consciousness without drugs.Working with the authorization of Gysin’s literary executor, William S. Burroughs, John Geiger has produced the first-ever biography of the painter, poet, piper Brion Gysin.