Brion Gysin
★★★★
Junk
WEWANTSOUNDS. DL/LP
A 24 carat early-’80s Parisian No Wave curiosity with Don Cherry on backing vocals.
It would be stretching the point to describe Brion Gysin as Little Richard to William Burroughs’ Pat Boone, but the original progenitor of the cut-up technique – sampling’s literary forebear – is long overdue some time in the pop crossover spotlight. Cue this welcome reboot of producer Ramuntcho Matta’s improbably successful attempt to reinvent the veteran British Canadian writer and artist as a kind of raddled Grace Jones. “It isn’t the cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in,” Elli Medeiros intones mordantly in landmark Afro-funk anti-nicotine statement Stop Smoking. Gysin’s rasped reply “Stop smoking? You’re joking…” was grimly prophetic as he was to die of lung cancer two years later, but even the bonus tracks on which he features only implicitly – especially Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Caroline Loeb’s captivating sapphic fragment VVV – testify to a life force that transcended the physical dimension.