“Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing. Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.” — Brion Gysin
In the smoky liminal spaces between literature and art, between mysticism and method, lived Brion Gysin—a man who seemed more like a myth than a mere mortal. Painter, writer, sound poet, and mind-expander, Gysin spent his life conjuring from the edges of experience, seeking the fissures where the ordinary cracked open into the extraordinary. While many remember him as the lesser-known companion of William S. Burroughs, to call him an understudy would be a disservice. Gysin was a visionary whose work laid foundations for avant-garde experiments in word, image, and sound that still ripple through postmodern art and media today.
Born in Taplow, England, in 1916, Brion Gysin’s early life was marked by movement and loss. His Canadian father died in World War I, and Gysin was raised between continents, caught between cultures—a pattern that would define his nomadic adult life. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and briefly joined the Surrealist movement in the 1930s, only to be expelled by André Breton, a moment that, in hindsight, seems less like a rejection and more like liberation. Gysin never wanted to belong to a school—he wanted to create new dimensions.
The Cut-Up Prophet
Gysin’s most famous contribution came not in painting, but in text. In 1959, while slicing through a stack of newspapers with a razor blade at the Beat Hotel in Paris, he accidentally created what would become known as the cut-up technique. Rearranging the fragments, he discovered new meanings, unexpected poetry, hidden messages. It was as if language itself had come alive.
His friend and literary partner William S. Burroughs would later popularise the method, using it extensively in works like The Soft Machine and Nova Express. But Gysin was its true alchemist. He believed cut-ups weren’t just a literary device—they were a tool for liberating consciousness, for breaking the spell of linear thought. “Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices,” he claimed. The technique became a precursor to remix culture, hypertext, and digital nonlinearity—Gysin as proto-hypermedia artist, decades ahead of the curve.
Dreamachines and Sonic Spells
But Gysin wasn’t content with bending text—he wanted to hack the brain itself. With mathematician Ian Sommerville, he co-invented the Dreamachine in the early 1960s: a spinning cylinder of light and shadow designed to stimulate the brain’s alpha waves. When viewed with eyes closed, the device could induce a trance-like, visionary state. Gysin called it the “first art object to be experienced with the eyes closed.” It was the precursor to modern immersive tech, a stroboscopic bridge to altered states, and a magickal device as much as a scientific one.
He was equally experimental with sound, exploring permutation poems, in which simple phrases are rearranged in every possible order—mechanically, hypnotically, ritually. These were not poems in the traditional sense. They were incantations, designed to reprogram consciousness through repetition and disruption.
Interzones and Intersections
Gysin’s work resists easy classification. He was an artist of interzones—geographic, cultural, psychological. Much of his life was spent in Tangier, Morocco, a city that for Gysin held the same liminal pull as Burroughs’ “Interzone.” He co-owned The 1001 Nights restaurant, where he helped introduce Moroccan trance music—the Master Musicians of Jajouka—to the Western avant-garde. He viewed the ritual music not as entertainment but as a living technology of ecstasy, something older than art, more primal than poetry.
This love of sound, ritual, and rhythm also infused his visual art, which blended calligraphy, abstraction, and Islamic aesthetics into works that seem to vibrate with hidden frequencies. His pieces often look like sigils or spells, encoded with motion, rhythm, and the ghost of language. They whisper in tongues, even when silent.
Legacy of a Trickster
Gysin died in 1986, never quite recognised in the mainstream but deeply revered in the underground. Brian Eno called him “the most influential person no one’s ever heard of.” David Bowie, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, and Laurie Anderson all claimed influence. He was a trickster figure, a cultural saboteur, a magical realist of the avant-garde.
In many ways, Gysin is the patron saint of the remix. He shattered the tyranny of the straight line—linear time, linear language, linear logic—and invited us into a labyrinth where meaning is fluid, identity is performative, and consciousness is something to be hacked, not accepted.
Why Gysin Still Matters
In an age of algorithmic feeds, AI-generated art, and hypertextual lives, Brion Gysin feels like a prophet whose time has finally come. His cut-up method echoes in digital collage, glitch aesthetics, and generative text. His Dreamachine prefigures virtual reality and brainwave tech. His insistence that “writing is fifty years behind painting” now sounds like a dare to writers to catch up—not with paint, but with code, sound, light, and the architecture of thought itself.
To follow Gysin is to step off the well-worn path and into a realm where language is alive, time folds, and every medium is a doorway. He reminds us that creativity isn’t about mastery of form, but about breaking forms open, listening to the voices in the noise, and having the audacity to follow them into the unknown.
He didn’t just make art.
He cast spells.
Further Exploration:
- The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin
- Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master (Documentary)
- Audio Works: “Recalling All Active Agents” and “Junk Is No Good Baby”
- The Process (Novel by Gysin) — A metaphysical road trip through the Sahara
His art invites not admiration, but initiation. Will you walk through the portal?