Matmos, and a Rag for William S. Burroughs

Featuring: Privileged junkie shit-disturbers, "Pistol Poem," Matmos, Scott Joplin, Joan Vollmer, William Tell, tequila, jazz cigarettes, faith?, way too many gunshots

Impossible Instruments #37

In the mid-‘00s at the invitation of former St. Louisians and current New Orleanians Stef Russell and Thomas Crone, I wrote a kind of meditation on a singular evening when I was no doubt returning from the Side Door or some other club. It was late. I’d just bought a Jetta with a rad upgraded stereo — a duel CD/cassette player! Matmos had released one of their thematically-linked albums, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. Each track on it is focused on a different famous shit-disturber, and harnesses-samples-deploys sounds and ideas that are somehow connected to each artist. The titles tell the story, kinda:

Roses And Teeth For Ludwig Wittgenstein
Steam And Sequins For Larry Levan
Tract For Valerie Solanas
Public Sex For Boyd McDonald
Semen Song For James Bidgood
Snails And Lasers For Patricia Highsmith
Germs Burn For Darby Crash
Solo Buttons For Joe Meek
Kendo For Yuko Mishima
Rag For William S. Burrroughs
Banquet For King Ludwig II Of Bavaria

I’d recently spent some time in San Francisco and, as it happened, that week Matmos had set up shop in a gallery at the Yerba Buena Institute for the Arts to perform for a themed show about work life. Their project involved improvising on their remarkable electronic gear from 9-5 every day for a week, in essence clocking in for the daily grind like your average Joe. I ended up getting there early often that week, which meant seeing them play while we were all waking up and having morning coffee.

I’ve since seen Matmos play a lot — most memorably with Sō Percussion at the Echo in LA. They played mic-ed cactus needles of various lengths, each of which had its own distinctive plonk-tone. The night they played on a bill with Terry Riley in 2010 at Walt Disney Concert Hall remains one of the most profound concerts I’ve ever experienced.

Anyway I was pretty obsessed with Matmos, so when Russell and Crone asked me to write something for a themed issued on faith, of which I have little, I pondered mystical connections. 52nd City was a quarterly that I believe drew its name from St. Louis’ population ranking among cities in America at the time.

Throat thusly cleared, here’s something on faith, tweaked here and there. It’s the only thing I’ve ever written on faith, in fact, that wasn’t about a cult or Christian rock — though for all I know some of the foreign-language albums I love could be praising religions that slaughter puppies as a rite.

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Drew Daniels and M.C. Schmidt in a promo image for their album The Civil War.

Everything is hazy (in a bottle-littered apartment)

Friday midnight I'm riding through the Central West End listening to the song "Rag for William S. Burroughs" by the [then] San Francisco group Matmos. It's one of those perfectly imagined spring nights in St. Louis, the kind that arrives maybe a half-dozen times a year. On the horizon is the beastly summer, in the rearview mirror the inconsequential winter. But here, as if balanced on the edge of a razor blade, is spring.

The windows are down, the moon roof is open. I am pointing my bow straight into the air and catapulting a rag for William Burroughs from my very loud supersonic hi-fi stereo system and into the nether-world. The arrow soars through the same Central West End air, give or take, that Burroughs inhaled as a 15-year-old enduring adolescence.

Is it an act of faith to think that rocking a thirteen-minute musical ode to Burroughs, fortunate son of the West End, at full volume on a Saturday night carries more weight here than doing the same thing in, say, Albuquerque? Once shot out of the moon roof, where will the sound land?

Is the song, recorded in San Francisco, shipped from a record label in New York, purchased in the Loop and fed into a CD player by an Edwardsvillian, enriching anything when the waves wash over the unfurling maple leaves? What is it, exactly, that I'm doing?

I'm trying to string something together. Something that can’t be held, can't be secured, can't be fully explained. I'm cutting into the present, filling the wound with a rag, then stitching the gesture into the fabric of the past.

"Rag for William S. Burroughs" begins with a simple piano rag, signifying, it would seem, the formative St. Louis years of one of the 20th century's most enigmatic shit-disturbers and cranks. The rag is not a barroom stomp, but a soft, calming melody which, at the two-minute mark, is murdered by a single, piercing gunshot. If you don’t know it’s coming, it will scare the bejeezus out of you. If we're following Burroughs' bio, the bullet is aimed an inch above (below?) the head of Burroughs' wife, Joan Vollmer.

It misses its mark. In 1951, Burroughs killed Vollmer during a bout of drunken gamesmanship involving a glass of gin instead of an apple, William Tell-style.

"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death," confessed Burroughs years later and in the song, the blast is followed by footsteps walking to a locked door, keys jangling, then the sound of typewriter keys striking the carriage. The keystrokes soon develop their own rhythm, and are joined by the beat of a Burroughs adding machine. The Burroughs family made their fortune with the machines. The tools get busy, weaving the intricate percussive patterns of a hundred monkeys banging out Naked Lunch. Gradually, the weird, elastic percussion of a darbuka joins in as Burroughs travels to Morocco. Heard at full volume when you're a little light headed and have enjoyed a jazz cigarette or two, it's easy to fall into a trance.

If the song seems too much like the score to a PowerPoint of Burroughs' life (move to the next slide when prompted), jamming it near his home feels positively transcendent — literally, as in to move through time and space, to cut from century to century, date to date, moment to moment.

(Trigger warning — literally: The below Gysin sound collage “Pistol Poem,” while a wild and remarkable document, is also super dang scary, especially for those living in war zones such as 21st century America.)

In Paris, 1958, Burroughs befriended painter and poet Brion Gysin, who at the time was experimenting with audio-tape. He'd dictate writings into the machine, then take a razor blade and splice the words into different orders. With the same material, Gysin created new permutations — sound re-edited and recontextualized to build something new.

For Burroughs, the idea was an epiphany. "When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time," he explained, "you find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts lead to future events." Working with a piece of writing by millionaire John Paul Getty, Burroughs created the sentence, "It's a bad thing to sue your own father." A year later, recalled Burroughs, one of Getty's sons did indeed file suit.

Explained Burroughs:

"We know so much that we don't consciously know we know that perhaps that the cut-in was not random... Cut-ups put you in touch with what you know, and what you don't consciously know you know." Ultimately, concluded Burroughs: "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."

So here I am, in the future, one thought in an intricate line of magnetic tape that connects me with Matmos with William Burroughs. Or: I am a spider building a web that crosses time and space, extends from the Central West End to New York to Mexico, stretches across the Atlantic, bypasses the Rock of Gibraltar and connects in Morocco. It winds around Lawrence, Kansas and is knitted into the Bellfontaine Cemetery, where the cigarette-stained voice and the crumbled claws of William Burroughs have rotted away.

What remains?

His words, sure, such as a portion of this Burroughs chant, which appears on a reissue of the writer's work called Break Through in Grey Room.

Silver arrow thru the night
Silver arrow take thy flight
Silver arrow seek and find
Piercing heart and piercing mind.

But something remains: an energy. A notion. Listening to "Rag for William S. Burroughs" while touring his terrain, the experience carries a certain weight; somehow, somewhere, surely there's a cosmic connection. (Right? Right?!) It's not that I think that the dead-as-stone Burroughs is witnessing my little gesture from another "realm." Of course, I'd love to think that the spirit of Burroughs is getting some sort of satisfaction from the gesture. Even more, I'd like to think that Burroughs is orchestrating my little maneuver. But no.

I'm cruising. I'm playing music on a car stereo loudly. The volume isn't the point. The thirteen-plus-minutes of this composition could be a mere whisper and the gesture would feel the same. I wouldn't be as happy about it, though, wouldn't feel the smack of the keys banging on my eardrums.

Maybe I'm giving a little something back to the community, and maybe creating a formula for another kind of cut-up, one that transposes a 2006 moment [kinda sorta updated in 2023] and a 1929 moment, when Burroughs was 15 and running wild.

I'm tossing into the atmosphere a ritual sacrifice of sound. It's a gift, a tithe, an offering to the dirt what bore him, to the spirit that blew through his being and jostled the leaves of the maples that he climbed, that pierced his heart and pierced his mind.