This is the first issue of Quinto Quarto Quarterly. Interviewed artists include Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, William Basinski, and TJ Hustler. The images within the interviews are incidental objects from the respective artist’s life; items which may either be quickly thrown away or cherished for decades. Whatever the particular item’s fate, it effectively made up the fabric of the creative environment for some period. This alchemy of marginal and centerstage also spills over into the interviewed artists themselves. Quinto quarto is literally translated from Italian as the fifth quarter. This is mathematically curious unless you know the phrase designates dividing animal meat in pre-modern Rome: The "first" quarter of meat going to nobles, the "second" going to clergy, the "third" to the bourgeoise, and the "fourth" to the military. What was left, the “fifth” was the leftovers, the offal for the proles, the rest of us. Contemporarily, you have upscale restaurants serving the fifth quarter as delicacies. QQQ aims to pull from the marginal delicacies, those artists or figures who perhaps work better outside the $100 steak dinner and yet, in time, or whenever, become so admired and so delicious they transform any category o r h i e r a r c h y w h a t s o e v e r. B o n a p p e t i t e . —————————— Jess Scott Los Angeles. March ’18.
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Breyer P-Orridge
An Interview with
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
declared medically dead thrice, a familial account of the evacuation of Dunkirk, and more. There’s a sort of magical daze after reading this that you should enjoy uncritically.
Before, during, or after consuming this interview, please seek out and bookmark the contributions of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, and COUM Transmissions. This will contextualize our swim around in the swells of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, the intragenerational role of The Creative, the efforts of 1960s communes to unlearn and go beyond, the last taboo of privacy, conundrums in technology, The Stones before and after Brian Jones, reincarnation, mediums, proto-Ouiji, pandorgeny, love, being
(Please note: Breyer P-Orridge uses ‘us’ and ‘we’ in the first person. All images courtesy of Breyer P-Orridge, except where noted.)
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Breyer P-Orridge
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And it was. One we still think is overlooked is Gasoline by Gregory Corso, which is a brilliant book of poetry.
We are accessible to people who are really motivated. We also get messages via Facebook from people who say, “I’m making an album at home in my bedroom and I think it’d be really good if you came and worked on it with me.” I mean, have you got a grasp on reality? How am I supposed to find money to travel to wherever you are, sleep on the floor in your bedroom, and make an album with you for no good reason? And I don’t know you and I don’t even like what you sent as an example. So, some people try to approach and fail miserably, and some people are not trying to do anything except in conversation become interesting and end up being the ones who get something from it. It’s a natural process.
Continuing on the topic of Burroughs, I was reading about how Burroughs had campaigned on your behalf for art grants. I’ve read some similar things about Ginsberg supporting new generation artists later on in New York. Do you think that’s happening now? Is it harder to connect with new artists laterally rather than on a hierarchical “fan basis”? We can only speak from our experience but, for example Dais Records, Ryan Martin—who is one of the two people who runs Dais records—was working at my then-studio cataloging all of my archives going to Tate Britain. One day Ryan came up and said, “What are these?” And we said, “Just some old reel-to-reel tapes.” “Yeah but what are they?” “You don’t want them, that’s just some old shit from when we didn’t know where we were—16 or 17, in the house.” “Well I’m interested, can I take them away and listen?” So he came back and said, “These should be available, people would be really interested to hear these.” “But they’re really poor quality.” And he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s as if you can see a sketchbook of you moving towards what became industrial music.” And so he released [Early Worm3] and it sold out within two weeks. Then he did another one, those went really fast, and that money basically became the seed money that started Dais Records. [Dais] has now released music by maybe 60 people or more, most of whom are young, and who may have not released records without that label. And he’s become my personal manager, so it still happens. He became a friend, and then became involved, then it went back into what he wanted to have happen.
We made a sculpture when we had a retrospective at the Rubin Museum a year ago. It was based on something that Brion Gysin said to me a long time ago: “Wisdom can only be passed on by the touching of hands.” In other words: one-on-one. So we made a sculpture of my right arm, shaking hands, cast in bronze, sticking out of a sheet of black metal. Beneath it is a brass plaque that says: ‘“Wisdom can only be passed on by the shaking of hands.”- Brion Gysin.’ You’re shaking hands with my arm and that’s symbolic of that process that happens. But you can’t guide it, and you can’t predict who it might be. You just get to know each other, become friends, and become admirers for the other person’s reason for doing things or their passion or their determination regardless of how hard it’s going to be. Perhaps without even knowing we unconsciously recognize ourselves in that, and we remember that it meant a lot to get support from someone. It’s really an important part of the process of being a creative person. It only works if you’re true to the self that you are, if you tell the truth, and show the truth of what you want to become, what you want to say. If you try and do it in a sort of considered way, as a strategy: it won’t work.
Then there’s Roxy Farman of Wetwear, who's a young woman in her 20s. We met her at a little arts event and she came up afterwards and talked, and she is now a lifelong friend. She became involved in making music as Wetwear and we put them on supporting Psychic TV a few times, and we always tell people about them. So it still happens, just like it did with me and Burroughs or me and [Brion] Gysin. If you can image that perhaps to some people, we are “a living legend,” to quote [laughs].
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Breyer P-Orridge
I read this thing you said about living in a commune in your youth, and that while you did in fact live there, you had “more cynical ideas than the others.” That makes a lot of sense to people now because there are so many different
Dais Records 2008, DAIS 001 [Cover Image above courtesy of Dais Records.]
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kinds of “alternatives” from the ‘60s, but at the time, how did it feel to not fit in with the socalled alternative? How did you find likeminded others? What was your criteria then?
Breyer P-Orridge
We came down in ’69 to watch the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park; Brian Jones had just been murdered and we wanted to see what they were like without him. They were terrible. When the evening came I thought, “Where am I going to sleep?” So I rang the number and they said, “Come on over.” So we got on the subway and went over, and stayed for a few months. We became part of their whole process, which was very rigorous: you didn’t own any clothes, you didn't have any money, you only ate the food you were given, you couldn’t sleep in the same place two nights running. You just had to keep a sleeping bag and keep moving; we slept on the roof between chimneys, or on the scaffolding, or in the backyard, the hallway—you name it, we slept there. It was all about breaking down conditioning, and recognizing how much conditioning we have in us that we’re not even aware as being put there. Just sleeping in the same place every night, that routine, is a symbol of not really seeing how many alternatives there really are. Why do you need to sleep in a bed? Why do you need to sleep in a room? Why do you need to sleep in the same place as you did yesterday? Do you need to? Well if you don’t need to, why are you doing it? Because you’re failing to break the habits and the routines that are holding you back. In order to do radical work, or new work of any kind, you need to let go of the old ways. So, for me it was like boot camp. It was really rigorous and austere and difficult, but we loved it. We had other people who turned up while we were there, and they had literally a nervous breakdown— catatonic and ended up having to be taken away by their family. They couldn’t live with not knowing what happened next. Whereas, we found that really exciting. We found all the different things challenging and exciting, other people found them challenging and destructive of their idea of what reality was.
Oh gosh! Jess, whoa. Some of it is truly the random chance of life. For example, with the Exploding Galaxy, the commune we joined first, they had just split up. They were a commune in London in Islington, and half of them had gone off to India to study Indian
yoga and dance. So they were short numbers when they came up to the university where we were in Hull. They asked around: “Is there anyone who you think might be into doing some improvised performance?” And apparently the majority of people said: Genesis. We honestly don’t remember a thing about what it was, but then we were still smoking hash at that time, so…” [laughs.] So they gave me a piece of paper with their phone number in London on it and said, “If you’re ever in London you can either crash at our place, or whatever.” !16
An Interview with
William Basinski
I was recently on a flight from LAX to JFK to play a festival. I checked my guitar in at the door of the airplane and waited for a claim tag. When the attendant closed the airplane to take off, I inquired where my tag was, and did my guitar make it onboard? The attendant fluttered by assuring me he didn’t have a tag but was sure it was somewhere onboard. A voice next to me peered out from a white brimmed hat and beautiful turquoise jewelry: “Oh, everyone’s so goddamn casual these days.” And this is how I met
the great American composer, William Basinski. Basinski takes us through a journey of ‘70s Texan wilderness, a stint in San Francisco, and he and his partner’s esteemed art cauldrons in New York during the good/bad old days. Basinski is often in his home studio or keeping the airline attendants of the world in check as he crisscrosses the globe with analog tape decks and sounds which have now influenced a generation of sound artists. (Thank you again for the cab fare, Billy.)
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side of the campus were pretty boring. I was pretty glamorous and I liked clothes and things. By chance, I met this incredible stunning girl, Champagne Harlot. She was the punk rock goddess of Denton, Texas. She was 16 and already in college. Six feet tall, pale with natural blonde hair, she turned herself into “Champagne Harlot.” The first time I saw her she had this asymmetrical bowl cut and always wore these shards of black fabric, tons of bracelets, fishnet stockings, and these giant stiletto sandals. And she was walking a lavender cat on a leash—I almost hit a tree.
model. So that’s how I met all these people, and Jamie11 was like the king of this group. He had already moved to San Francisco; everyone just wanted to go to Mecca then. Had he finished school? He’d finished. He’s eight years older than me. But he’d taken his time. He’s always been a traveler. Anyway, all my friends always had new music, so I got to hear Steve Reich, that tape loop stuff he was doing and Drumming12. Then, Music For 18 Musicians13 came out, he’d translated his phase shifting stuff to orchestration. It was just mesmerizing and it really caught my attention.
She dyed it? She hung out with all the fag hair dressers on the art side of town, she was in the Art Department.
And you were still in Texas?
So they’d practiced on the cat.
Yes. As a composer, you know what my work is like, it’s very time-based. It takes a long time for things to develop. In my Music History class our teacher introduced us to John Cage, and that was another major piece that gave me a great deal of freedom as a composer. I didn’t finish college, I didn’t take orchestration—I didn’t really do things the way you’re supposed to do it. But I started with tape.
It wasn’t their cat [laughs]. And she was just out for a stroll in the twilight. We also had a class at the same time. You know how you kind of queue up for class ahead of time, well I’d worked up the nerve to present her with a gold Cadillac V crest from the hood of a car I’d found. I’d managed to put a chain on it and presented it to her. She loved it and started talking to me.
Then I met Jamie, he visited Denton and we fell in love. Weeks later, Mark Gash wanted me to go back to being his roommate. I’d been nude modeling for the Art Department but they hadn’t paid me. That was $20 an hour back then, you know. So, eventually I’d gotten my money, then Jamie wrote and said: “Come to California.” So I left, on Halloween, 39 years ago to San Francisco.
Had you talked to her before? No, I just went, “I wanted to say hello.” Like, “I have been to school in my life and I am a magazine reader!”10 So we hit it off. That year I was living offcampus in a duplex on the other side of Denton near where all the lesbians lived because the other school in Denton was Texas Women’s University, a big nursing school.
Did you fly or did you drive?
So I met my first gay people and just flew out of the closet. [Champagne Harlot] introduced to me to all these queers. She’d been talking about drag queens— she was a super smart, intellectual, glamour girl. She wanted to go to New York, meet Andy Warhol, be a
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Impression of Caroll Baker in the film Baby Doll (1956).
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Artist and curator James Elaine, Basinski’s partner.
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Reich, Steve. Drumming. Deutsche Grammophon (1974)
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Reich, Steve. Music for 18 Musicians. ECM (1978)
Basinski
No, I flew. I flew in a Halloween costume with my saxophone and a little suitcase. What was your costume?
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Basinski
It was kind of like a time warper costumer: ‘30s highwaisted, black, triple-pleated, cuffed wool trousers, black tuxedo shirt, little bowtie, vest, and a gorgeous black wool hooded cape with red satin lining. And then I had a little Cinderella mask: I was Dracula in drag. And I had black alligator steel-tipped stilettos.
scattered around and we would record them and make drones. We recorded everything. We bought tape decks, used tapes.
[Laughs.] Oh my god, that sounds so good.
Yeah, because I didn’t have any musician friends. I was new in town. All my friends [in San Francisco] were artists. I didn’t have anyone to jam with or anything. We lived there for about a year. [Jamie’s] brother David who lived with us, wanted to get his own place with his new boyfriend. So we ended up finding a storefront down on Fillmore below Haight. It’s a hair dresser place now, it had been an old evangelical storefront type church. It was a mess but we got it for $198 a month. We used to walk to Café Flore. We painted it all white and had a little bedroom in the back. I had my studio in there. Then Jamie used the big front room for these big paintings he was making on the floor. He had a couple shows at galleries—down on Polk at the Dana Reich Gallery. It was a real cool gallery; Dana loved our work but didn’t really ever sell anything. He and his partner then both got Aids, and that was terrible.
Was this when you started to move away from the traditional instrument?
There wasn’t hardly anyone on the plane. The stewardesses just loved me when I came on. You know, you could smoke on the plane then. They sat me down in the front and started bringing me champagne. I was so drunk when I got off the plane! [Laughs.] At SFO? Yeah! So what neighborhood were you living in in San Francisco? Haight Ashbury at first. It was kind of scary. A shared house kind of thing? It was six room flat, right above a music store with instruments and stuff. I’d go down there and practice and do Steve Reich, [music sounds] do-doo-do-doo-do.
Quite early on then. Yeah. And then I was working at a sausage clip factory in Oakland.
Which street? What’s that? Literally sausages?
On Haight. I don’t know what’s there now but the name of the store was Chickens That Sing Music.
Yeah it was the Tipper Tie Factory. My Aunt Margaret’s boyfriend was named Tip Tipper, he was a millionaire meat packing industrialist who had revolutionized the meat packing industry in the ‘30s with these tipper tie machines. Basically he invented these machines that would take a big coil wire, run it into a stamper, stamp them into little staples, and they’d come down and you’d tape them, and put them in a box. Then there was another machine that would clamp them down on to turkeys instead of having to tie them with a string.
How long were you in San Francisco then? About two years. Jamie wanted to make it in New York as an artist. What was he spending his time doing? He was painting and working in Berkeley on the buyer truck for one those big used record stores. He would come home with armfuls of records every day, all the cool avant-garde German stuff, Fripp and Eno, everything. [It] really opened up my ears to what was possible. He collects everything. We would pick up cool old ‘50s TVs off the street, bring them home, plug them in, see what they did, weird shit. We had [TVs]
He made a fortune on that. He’d had an invalid wife who was in an expensive nursing home somewhere and had some rotten kids, so he was having to make money again in the ‘70s. So he changed his patent and started
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Basinski
An Interview with
TJ Hustler
TJ Hustler is The Preacherman, is Tim Jones, a man who has been quietly making brilliant homemade funked-out dance recordings in the Bay Area for over three decades. Making his way from the farmland of the Central Valley to working as an engineer at IBM, the natural musician was a natural tinkerer, building some of the earliest modified synthesizers and casually
performing on weekends in novelty impersonation and ventriloquy acts. Here is a skim through the perils of technology and surveillance, mind control, the modified synth, the Fillmore District’s late jazz scene, driving taxis in Vegas, his trademark Universal Philosophy Productions, the first drum machines, and the potential of comets hitting Earth. The Preacherman also   !82
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Hustler
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Hustler
That was when I was still working for IBM and I stopped working for them in ’80. I’d been in San Jose from ’74 to ’80.
So you were playing these live instruments, you were playing the organ— See when I’d buy the keyboards, I would take the guts out. I’d modify them so I could sit down and play them all. I was the first one to come up with the split keyboard: piano on one side and then the keyboard layered in the organ. You could actually put eight instruments on top of each other, they had the keys inside. At that time I just used the shell of the organ. I’d build my own bass pedals, and on [Age of Individualism] that was the first record that had the [Moog] Taurus bass pedals split in. When I did that, I had a brand new type of bass. That allowed me play a rolling bass. This is the first record where I played all of the bass pedals and never broke the bass—you never hear it stop. People listen to that and say, “What is that?” That’s the rolling bass; I’d play the bass pedal with the top of my hand.
When you were playing with those early bands, Mysterious Minds and Dawn and the Sunsets — The Mysterious Minds was a band—when I recorded I used a pipe organ. A guy worked at Pizzas and Pipes— he fixed the organs and we lived in the same apartment building. So that’s where I’d gotten a lot of my ideas from— Peace and Pipes? Pizzas and Pipes—they had one in Burlingame too. The guy had a pipe organ while you’d have a pizza. It was a like a church pipe organ. He had buttons that would play the drums, buttons that were pedals and I’d gotten the same idea. I put buttons on the bass pedal so I could play the drums too.
So you were playing them all at once? All at the same time.
So you had a need to play the music live that you were making, and that’s where the modifications to the instruments happened— the need to play it all at a show and do it all at once.
Let’s go back to when you’re doing the comedy with the mannequin: how many shows would you say you performed as that duo? A lot of them. Back then—it wasn’t how it is now, a lot of people were promoting [shows]. I played down in Half Moon Bay for about a year. I’d play with the dummy: tell a few jokes then play the organ. You had to make up for what was missing, you had to carry the show.
Modification is how I got the sound going. Back then Moog and Roland were making all kinds of synthesizers because it was easier and cheaper to carry around—instead of carrying around a Fender Rhodes, which was like 300 pounds. The keyboard didn’t feel right, I didn’t play it because it wasn’t really any good. So I wired it into the Hammond B3 keyboard and it had a really good feel to it. I lugged that around for like thirteen years. That was back in my high school days in Fresno.
Another group I played with was called Sonny’s Lookalike, he was in Burlingame. He would go around and find someone that looked like a star, and he got me because he thought I looked like Billy Dee Williams27. I played the music and they all sung. We had a Liza Minelli, he did Sonny as Sonny and Cher. We’d play the Hilton at the airport, we did many shows, he got all the gigs.
My sister was up [in Oakland] and hooked up with Eddie Moore and Merle Saunders. I used to come up and hang out with them because they would play with Jimmy Smith and they’d all hang out together. There was a big jazz scene on Fillmore, the whole place was just clubs from one end to the next. It’s all gone now.
Were you still working at IBM when you were doing that?
Was your sister a musician? 27
Billy Dee Williams, American actor and singer best known for his role in Star Wars franchise.
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No, she just hung around. I was the only one in the family that actually played. They made me take the lessons and that was it—I kept playing.
Hustler
them. That Preacherman record—see that [thumb drive] has fifteen songs, four videos, everything. But in the ‘80s you only did the one solo record?
How did they first realize that you were talented with piano?
Yeah the Mysterious Minds and [Age of Individualism].
We just got a piano and started playing. At that time I had model airplanes and I was building motors and
So Mannequin Philosophy is just an image? It didn’t come out on its own?
flying them around in circles—and then the piano just overtook me. After I was playing the classical stuff I needed a little more noise so I went to the organ. And when I started making more noise—that was it [laughs]. I quit playing sports just to play the music, it was much more fun that running around shooting ball.
Just an image. Then when I went to Vegas and CDs got cheap. You could have one CD if you wanted to. The price came down real fast. I’ve got a lot of videos too. Were you envisioning these records and CDs as demos or were they a finished product?
I wanted to make a little list of the gear you had: The Hammond B3—what other stuff were you using through the years?
It was a finished project. It was finished when I had it on a cassette. A demo is basically the same thing. Did it ever matter to you to have it put out on a bigger label or have a record deal?
All the Roland drum machines. Every year they’d make a better one so I’d buy another one. And then with the keyboard it was just the Casio because they had the best sound. I still use the Casio.
I made the music because it was easy for me to do it when I practiced. I got something good and I hit a button and there it was. It’s not like figuring it all out and [then] going into a studio.
Did you just see this at music shops or were you seeing people already using this stuff in bands?
The other side of it was that there were a lot bands with stories about how making the music was so bad it just made you not want to. A lot of people I knew did records—with Sylvester, they were called Two Tons O’ Fun. I knew them personally. They would tell me stories—“Why did I even do this?” They would talk about everything that was going on. Back then people talk about what was really happening in the music business, why it won’t work, why this or that, you can’t get anywhere, or talk about how Motown stole Casablanca, Stax Records. How you build something and all of sudden it’s zipped away from you real fast and you have to give up. I listened to that and I just did the records I felt like doing.
I’d go to Guitar Center—back then the shop had someone in the back who fixed stuff. It’s not like how it is now—nothing really breaks. It’s at the point now where everything we want is in the keyboard: we got digital, ProTools without the screen, mixers, effects. And they don’t want too much for it too. Yeah it’s gotten cheaper. $3,000 for a keyboard then, now I got that one for $300. That phone there, it’s got everything in it. So there are only two records that originally came out?
I worked with a lot of people even when I did it by myself. I had two singers. One guy I played with for about 3-4 years—several gospel records. I’ve had my own website for fifteen years: UNIPP.com from about 2001-2002.
Well, after that I went to CDs. CDs were expensive then. [Originally] I was able to record it, put everything on a tape and listen to it. Then I transferred all my tapes to CD. I wrote a lot of songs. I’d pick the best songs and re-do them and re-do them and re-do !95
ART THROUGH INTERVIEW
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