“In 1979, TAP had opened an artspace in London, which is still in existence, known as the October Gallery. In 1984, Férez left Santa Fe to take over as its director. Among the artists to catch the Mexican’s eclectic eye and be signed to the gallery were Burroughs and the one-time surrealist Brion Gysin. Although Gysin was notorious for shooting flame-tipped arrows from the window of Paul Bowles’s Paris hotel room, he was also, like Yoshida, a talented Japanese calligrapher. Holed up with the author of The Naked Lunch at the Beat Hotel in Paris, he passed his knowledge on - a lesson that bore fruit in the thick black, Klee-like characters Burroughs drew for the jacket of his book’s first edition.

Leaving the October Gallery to set up as an independent curator in 1991, Férez continued his association with all three artists. For Gysin, who died in 1986, he wrote what remains the best book on his work, Thames & Hudson’s Tuning into the Multimedia Age (2003).”

(Source: independent.co.uk)

Iggy contributed this text on Gysin to the 1992 Here To Go Show, a countercultural festival celebrating the three major members of the Tangier Beat Scene, Gysin, Burroughs, and Hamri: “Brion Gysin - what a beautiful guy. I met him in Paris, he had red apple cheeks like Maurice Chevalier, a head of wavy white hair and a cool blue blazer and eyes too. The eyes bubbled and danced and I had fun with this guy. He acted like a human being and never ‘interviewed’ me or pried into shit or talked creepy rubbish - tho’ he was a good-time boheme sweetheart with plenty of rubbish he could talk. I dug his record, the one I heard, I really dug his book - Let The Mice In - and I think his painting is so beautiful. One time about four or so in the morning I wanted to sleep and he walked off down the dark Rue saying something like, ‘Oh shucks, don’t wanna go home alone.’ He was a real human being.”

Brion Gysin, 1977: “Iggy the djinn who escaped from the bottle to make our every wish come true. When he staggered into my life I’d spent a long time immersed in the music and magic of Morocco. I had involvements with experimental music as practised by Steve Lacy, Henry Chopin, Joujouka, Ornette Coleman…experiments with Uhers…the atonal as much as Bo Diddley or the Stones…so we had things to talk about. When punk came along with people like Richard Hell and Patti Smith I could see parallels between what those people were doing and the earliest manifestations of surrealism so I determined to get involved. Then I wrote this song for Iggy. He did talk about recording ‘Blue Baboon’ but as of right now nothing had come of it. Somebody whose judgment I very much trust made the point to me that he isn’t as sexy or attractive as people say but, in fact, somewhat creepy or small-time. I never saw that myself. He is a good talker, like a Moroccan he’ll keep you up talking all through the night, a son of a gun, all-night riffing on nightmares and dreams and facts and figures and right and left and what are we here for?”

— Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop by Joe Ambrose

The Guardian, Saturday 15 November 2003

I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him. Right away I asked about Brion Gysin. Gysin would always be in the dedications or introductions to Burroughs’s books, but he was a mysterious character, who got little attention from the public and the people I knew. I wondered who he was and about his past in terms of the bigger picture of Burroughs’s experiments, particularly with tape recorders and cut-ups.

Burroughs wrote me a letter of introduction and I contacted Gysin in Paris. When I met him, I felt I knew why he was kept hidden away. He was an amazingly charming man with a powerful energy and kaleidoscopic knowledge. Once you had met him, everyone else seemed a little dull.

To me, Gysin was the source of the energy we associate with the most radical experiments of the Beats. He was the real source of the ideas; other people just applied them. That was a really important shift in my appreciation of the Beatnik phenomenon. From that moment I was hooked, fascinated and impressed by each layer of Gysin I discovered. As I peeled things away over the years, I was never disappointed. There was never an end to it. He was the only person I’ve met whom I would unquestioningly call a genius.

My first clear idea of him as an important contemporary artist and writer was through The Third Mind. Even now, I would recommend that as a very powerful manual on contemporary culture and how to explore it. I think it’s the bible of experimentalism of the past 50 years.

Gysin trivialised his application of cut-ups, saying that he accidentally cut through newspapers, assembled the pieces and was amused by what he read across the page. But it was obvious he had lived in Paris through the key moments of the art movements of the 20th century, particularly Dada and surrealism, and that he was very aware of the Tristan Tzara tradition of throwing words into a hat, pulling them out and reading a poem.

Gysin was more methodical than he pretended. He understood more than anyone else at that point in culture that, just as we can take apart particles until there’s a mystery, so we can do the same with culture, with words, language and image. Everything can be sliced and diced and reassembled, with no limit to the possible combinations.

I spent six years trying to persuade Burroughs to release an album of the tape-recorder experiments he and Gysin had made. The implications of the cut-ups, the technology and tape experiments and the Dreamachine are powerful and far reaching. There’s an amazing piece of tape from the 1950s, featuring Gregory Corso, Burroughs, Gysin and a couple other Beats, on which you can actually hear William cutting up a letter and saying: “Let’s see what it really says.”

These mythological moments affected not just the careers of the protagonists, but our whole attitude to sampling, tape loops and new ways of organising popular music that would not have happened otherwise. These tape-recorder experiments in Paris are absolutely the root of industrial music. There’s a very specific lineage of experimentation.

I would place Gysin at the junction of the old way of perceiving the world and the new - a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the last century. It’s no accident that the atom got split and gave us particle physics at the time LSD was doing the same with consciousness and Gysin and Burroughs were doing it with culture.

Though Gysin was outwardly rather sceptical, in private he was very mystical and interested in the tradition of the artist-healer. If one didn’t look at the very nature of how we build and describe our world, he thought, we get into very dangerous places. Once you believe things are permanent, you’re trapped in a world without doors. Gysin constructed a room with infinite doors for us to walk through.

What amazed me about Gysin’s work was how it could be applied to behaviour: there were techniques to free oneself through the equivalent of cutting up and reassembling words. If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species.

I first saw Gysin’s calligraphic works as abstract paintings. Gysin told me they were paintings of light and, once I saw they were depictions of light striking things, I began to see people, trees, landscapes, all kinds of vistas that were realities I hadn’t seen before. He basically paints portals that shift our perception as we look, changing the way we see things.

The Dreamachine was the first artwork to be looked at with the eyes closed. Gysin’s art illustrates the way the eye and the brain decode information. If you work with a dreamachine you go through various stages that relate to Gysin’s paintings and drawings, which actually documented the images that seem to occur when you are fed pure light by flicker.

More interesting is that a lot of them were done as magical, functional paintings. He would take words, break them down into hieroglyphics, then turn the paper and do it again and again until the magical square was filled with words. Gysin worked with the idea of painting as magic, to change the perception of people and to reprogramme the human nervous system.

The original motives for what we now call art were the functional techniques of the shaman to make things happen (for a hunt to be successful, for example), to explore dimensions of consciousness that would otherwise be inaccessible, much like the Dreamachine. Gysin used any medium, working with it to find a way to demonstrate that reality could be turned into a jigsaw: then we could make the pictures we wanted from it rather than inheriting them from other people.

His last painting, Caligraffiti of Fire, was a beautiful work hung on all four walls of a room so that you had to spin round to see it. Instead of the Dreamachine spinning and the viewer being static with their eyes closed, the viewer stands in the centre of the room and spins with eyes open. People are tricked by it into doing a dervish dance. I’d imagine, in the perfect situation, Gysin would have liked the viewer to spin round until they fell over, and then see what happened.

I made an agreement with Gysin before his death that I would try to champion and vindicate his work and legacy. He was living opposite the Beaubourg in Paris, and any time I had spare money I would go to see him. I’d get up and go to his apartment at around 11am, make mint tea, then sit down at his table by the new flower arrangement - he liked to have fresh flowers - and start talking. And then it would be 11 at night and I’d go back to where I was staying and come back the next morning. In a way, he was my university. I’m glad to have been a student.

· Genesis P-Orridge was talking to Tim Cumming.

(Source: Guardian)