William S. Burroughs
«The Electronic Revolution»

A few days after the news of the death of William S Burroughs spread like a virus through the mutterlines of the mass media, Richard H. Kirk comments on the impact of Burroughs's work on the music he made in the late 1970s with Stephen Mallinder and Christopher Watson in Cabaret Voltaire. «A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music,» he says. «One book in particular, The Electronic Revolution, was an influence on us.»
Compared to a novel such as «The Naked Lunch,» «The Electronic Revolution,» published in 1970, is a virtual samizdat text, but for musicians like Kirk it pointed the way to a new methodology. «It was almost a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd,» he explains, «to promote a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself. That side was always very interesting to us.» In both «The Electronic Revolution» and «The Job» (1970), Burroughs mapped strategies for the use of tape recorders as instruments of psychic terrorism.»

(source: Biba Kopf, «Spreading the Virus», in: The Wire, Issue 164, 1997, http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/crashhtml/utn/10.htm)