Audio cut-up to make new stories out of old ones.
“For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall:
The order of the phrases makes
No difference at all.”
Created by the poet Tristan Tzara, ‘cut up’ is the deconstruction of a primary text using the random cutting up of words and phrases to form new sentences and thus a new piece of writing. It is a process of extraction and reconstruction of a new meaning of language, based on chaotic intuition and the free creative flow.
Kurt Cobain, who had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Burroughs, was one of the maximum exponents in the 1990s of cut-up literature, declaring that his lyrics were the result of his cut up poems. Later, Thom Yorke would imitate the form that was supposedly first used by the surrealists, pulling cut up words out of a hat to write the entire Kid A album.