Free Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel

from right to left, [and together they] formed a sort of gridwork which covered and integrated the picture space. . . . (Gysin,
Here to Go
, p. 53)
    Such a technique could simply be parsed as modernist abstraction, the dissolution of the word into a form disconnected from its signifying power. But far from diminishing the power of language, Gysin practiced his calligraphic overlays as a means of increasing their capacity to work upon the world by stressing their radical kinship with the principles of associative binding found in folk magic practices of charm and spell-making. Gysin’s description of a charm secretly hidden in his ill-fated Tangiers restaurant, the Thousand and One Nights, redescribes sympathetic magic as sculptural assemblage and finds common ground between his own art practice and the curse of an unknown enemy:
    I found a magic object, which was an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing, and the writing when deciphered by friends who didn’t even want to handle it, because of its magic qualities, when even educated Moroccans were not anxious to get in touch with, but it said something like, an appeal to one of the devils of fire, the devil of smoke—to take Brion away from this house: as the smoke leaves the chimney may Brion leave this house and never return. . . . And within a short time I indeed lost the restaurant and everything else. . . . But I realized that this was a very interesting traditional exampleof the type of magic that one can read about in any study of magic where this sort of, uh—what’s the word for it?—I saw it as an example of a cabalistic square, which I then began to apply much more directly to my own painting when I returned to Paris in 1958. (Gysin, p. 54)
    Gysin’s biographer John Geiger draws an interesting connection between the formal aspects of Gysin’s calligraphic grids and certain visual and perceptual phenomena experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs:
    The calligraphic abstract compositions were based on the layering of Japanese script read vertically with Arabic script read horizontally, forming a grid with the magical appearance of language. Such grids, Gysin argued, had a broad application to the storage of human knowledge, from cabalistic magic to computer mathematics. There is also evidence suggesting that grids are physiologically generated by the mind under the influence of hallucinogenic substances. (Geiger, p. 124)
    Anyone who has ever been suddenly arrested mid—LSD trip by the hypnotic textural richness of the vertical and horizontal weave created by overlapping individual threads within their own pair of blue jeans can vouch for the sudden, arresting impact of simple visual forms under the correct chemical conditions. Though Geiger does not cite the source of this connection between visual grids and hallucinogens, experimental studies have discovered a chemical link between hallucinogens and repetitive phenomena. As Simon Reynolds notes of MDMA in
Generation Ecstasy
, “Recent research suggests that the drug stimulates the brain’s 1b receptor, which encourages repetitive behavior” (p. 85). Reynolds suggeststhat the predilection of those on hallucinogenic drugs for deeply repetitive musical forms may have a basis in brain chemistry. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain packages of contemporary sequencing and editing software refer to precisely quantized, metronomic, lockstep editing environments as “grid mode,” thus realizing at the technological level the comparison between rigidly lockstep mechanical drum patterns and visual grids already implicit in the hallucinatory, magical poetics of Brion Gysin’s calligraphy, and in the relentless pulsation of Throbbing Gristle’s “Still Walking.” The song rides the line between entrancing and annoying, but such is the cost of doing business with elemental,