Real English Tea Made Here is an anthology of the cut-up tapes of William S. Burroughs. Containing rare and unpublished material, of over three hours duration, the collection provides a valuable insight into Burroughs' methodology and constitutes an important document of his expansion from cut-ups on paper to vocal permutations and sonic experimentation.
The tapes curated as Real English Tea Made Here were originally created in Tangier and New York in the early 1960s using reel-to-reel analogue tape, sound-on-sound technology. The cut-up collage concept, with its roots in Dada soundworks and the simultaneous poetry of Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco
and Tristan Tzara, released Burroughs from the constraints of linear narrative.
These early sonic experiments and the possibilities they imply have had a wide-ranging impact on the use of tape-collage and lyric forms by artists such as the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Sonic Youth among many others; as well as the technique of digital sampling.
