Artist, author, sound poet, and inventor Brion Gysin was born to British Canadian parents on 19th January 1916 in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. A member of the Paris Surrealist group in the 1930s, part owner of a restaurant in Tangiers through the 1950s where he hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka as the house band, and resident of the 'Beat Hotel' in Paris through the 1960s, he is now perhaps best remembered as the creator of the 'Cut-up technique' that he further deveoped with his close friend William S. Burroughs, who described Gysin as "...the only man I've ever respected."
It is, of course, an utter shame that this astonishing artist's work should be so reduced, but his story is perhaps all too common of those wishing to push boundaries. His Souk inspired calligraphic art is often sublime, as is his grid work created in Paris using a carved out paint roller at the same time as he was developing a whole new language of sonic poetry with his 'Permutation Poems'.
Here though we are focussing on another key invention of the Paris years, that of 'The Dreamachine', a spinning, stroboscopic, flickering light machine that, when stared at through closed eyes, produces vivid eidetic images. Developed with the assistance of fellow Beat Hotel residents, Ian Sommerville, Gysin's plans for 'The Dreamachine' were bold and many but ultimately doomed to failure.
The documetary below by Canadian film-maker Nik Sheehan, tells the story of the machine, and by extension of it's creator and his cohort of friends, and features along the way archive and new footage of the likes of Genesis P-Orridge, Lee Ranaldo, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Ira Cohen, Richard Metzger, John Giorno, DJ Spooky and Kenneth Anger. It's an entrely fascinating story of an entirely fascinating man who for many is, at best, a peripheral figure in the life of his much more famous writer friend but who is deserving of being apprecited entirely on his own merits.
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