By 1985, Brion Gysin had been around. Born in 1916, he ditched his native Britain for Paris in the 1930s to make it as an artist. He hung out with Dalí and the Surrealist set, whose quasi-leader André Breton kicked him out of a major group show for being friends with the likes of queer hero Gertrude Stein; as the story goes, it was Gysin who developed the marijuana fudge Stein popularized as the Alice B. Toklas Brownie in her notorious cookbook. By the 1950s, he was in Tangier with good friend William S. Burroughs. There, as another story goes, he booked the Master Musicians of Joujouka to play at his café, the 1001 Nights, and introduced them to the Rolling Stones, kickstarting pop psychedelia. Later, back in Paris with Burroughs at the notorious Beat Hotel, he systematized a new randomizing literary technique, the cut-up, and with it made sound poetry recordings that used turns of phrases like samples, a tool Bowie would utilize in his Berlin trilogy. Gysin also invented, with some help from math wiz Ian Sommerville, a device called the Dreamachine, whose patterns of flickering, stroboscopic light—produced by a perforated shade spinning around a light source—are designed, when viewed through closed eyes, to stimulate the brain’s alpha waves. It casts shadows across lighting and set designs (and stoned student dorm rooms) to this day. By the early 1980s, Gysin had traveled the world, performing and recording his hypnotic poetry on stage and on record, making paintings based on studies of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and generally living the cult hero life. What else could he do?
Make a disco record! Gysin had taken as an assistant a high school student named Ramuntcho Matta, whose brother was the influential New York artist Gordon Matta-Clark; when Gordon died suddenly in 1978, Ramuntcho returned and spent time working in Laurie Anderson’s studio. Back in Paris by 1980, Matta culled from the city’s famed club Le Palace a who’s-who of underground disco-not-disco luminaries, including Ze records chanteuse Lizzy Mercier Descloux, along with global figures like Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang and jazz legend Don Cherry. Meanwhile, years of performing his demanding, loopy poetry had turned Gysin into a kind of ideal frontperson for this kind of jittery rhythm. They all got together and made Junk, first released in 1985 on the French label Mosquito, put out on CD in 1991 by Crammed, and now reissued in all its freaky, funky glory by Wewantsounds.
Opener “Kick (Disco Mix)” was recorded in 1980, the same year as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and the mood is similar: Matta’s guitar is as percussive as Niang’s supple beat and Jean-Pierre Coco’s talking drums. Gysin and Cherry inject the groove with various permutations of the phrase, “Kick that habit, man,” while Cherry sprays and squiggles with his pocket trumpet. It’s intoxicating. The reissue appends two very welcome versions, a “7" Alternative Mix” that’s essentially an edited vamp, and an instrumental dub; those jonesing for more should score “Kick That Habit Man,” a kind of cover made the same year by San Francisco industrial innovator Monte Cazazza for a 7" released by Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records.
With its bassy hook and chicken-scratch guitar, “Sham Pain” could be Chic, if their legendary fury at being turned away from Studio 54 soured instead of soared. “Insane, insane! Why am I always to blame?” Gysin screeches. Guitars make sounds of scrunched-up faces, the bass rolls its eyes. “Complain, complain!” he caterwauls. “I seem to recall we had some kind of ball/But for the life of me, darling/I can’t seem to remember your name/It was a long noble name….” The sneering tumbles out of him, bravura and effete. The title track punctures the druggie slumbers his demimonde too often mistook for a muse with literal alarm bells and a bassline that stumbles around like it’s trying to find the floor. “Junk is no good, baby,” Gysin proclaims, and backup singer Yann Le Ker, of French post-punkers Modern Guy, concurs with a catchy, “no good, no good, no good.” Gysin ponders various permutations of the sentiment, but the answer stays the same.
Two tracks explore the joys of queer sex. Whatever you think of primitivism as a fetish—and, given Gysin’s extensive academic work, including writing a history of slavery in Europe, as one of the very first recipients of a Fullbright, the racial politics can’t have been lost on him—the bounce of “Baboon” is undeniable, and his delivery outrageously winning, somewhere between the knowing flamboyance of Quentin Crisp and the louche menace of Grace Jones. “V.V.V.”, meanwhile, is a Sapphic celebration so insouciantly sexy that it seems impossible to believe that it slunk around for some forty years without attaining at least the underground anthem status of, say, Gina X’s “No G.D.M.” Let’s rectify that.
All parties end, of course. Junk concludes with a golden-hour meditation on nostalgia, with Matta voicing Gysin’s words. “Sometimes I’m close to tears,” he sings, guitars welling up behind him. Metronomic percussion counts down the hours. “All those years, for really nothing,” he sighs, “unless your face appears.” Gysin does appear; he sings himself off the stage in the album’s most astonishing moment, “Stop Smoking.” The lungs of the track are its circling rhythm, an Afropop-ish bop; above the beat, conch shells wheeze. “Isn’t the cough that carries you off,” Elli Medeiros of Stinky Toys sings, her clear voice a nag, a nursery rhyme. “It’s the coffin they carry you off in.” Gysin battled cancer for much of his life, and his vocals here are constantly interrupted, or perhaps punctuated, by wet, racking hacks. “Stop smoking? Ha ha ha you gotta be [coughs] joking,” he announces in a voice that makes Mark E. Smith’s ravaged larynx sound like Ariana Grande. “Nicotine is mean,” he manages to get out, a little awed. It’s like he’s playing the phlegm. A year after Junk released, he’d be dead of lung cancer, ashes floating on the breeze over the Caves of Hercules in Morocco like a conga drum finding its rhythm. The man who was everywhere was finally nowhere—but remembered forever on this wild, fabulous record.
