Dye Hard Intervew: Ramuntcho Matta: Expanding human capacity

Credit: Oona Matta

Ramunchto Matta is a French composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has worked with people such as Don Cherry, Brion Gysin, John Cage, Chris Marker,  and Robert Wilson. He has released 34 solo CDs and collaborated on about 20 other albums. He has exhibited his visual work in Paris, New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Rome.

A book titled Hello Yes Hello: 30 Dialogues, containing conversations between Kathelin Gray and Ramuntcho Matta about Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, was published by Moloko Plus in 2025, and Ce que Brion m'a dit de Gysin (Marcel le Poney) in 2026.

Your father was the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who knew writers and artists such as Andre Breton, Joyce Mansour, Max Ernst, and Robert Motherwell. I imagine your childhood must have been interesting, with many famous artists around you. What was it like?

Everything was normal.

It was “normal” to sleep in a closet with holes in the door to be able to breathe...Read more.

Interview with Ramuntcho Matta in The Odd Magazine

Ramuntcho Matta.
Photographer: Oona Matta

 

The Odd Magazine 31 is now out, and among other goodies contains an interview (in English and French) with musician and artist Ramuntcho Matta. In the interview, Ramuntcho talks about people such as his father, surrealist artist Roberto Matta; Ira Cohen and William Burroughs; but most of all about his friendship with Brion Gysin. He also chats about his music and visual art.

Glowing review of Who was Sinclair Beiles?

I found this glowing review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? on Goodreads today: I certainly could not have asked for more!

Thank you, Mat!

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An excellent 'festschrift' (or 'celebration'), rather than a strict biography, on the mysterious South African beat writer, Sinclair Beiles.

Beiles is probably most famous for helping Burroughs get Naked Lunch published at Olympia through Girodias, at a time when Burroughs was really strung out on paregoric and/or heroin. His most famous work in print is probably as one of the four contributors (Beiles, Burroughs, Corso & Gysin) of the now legendary cut-up compilation, Minutes to Go, published in 1960.

However, as this book illustrates, Beiles is [sic] quite a prolific poet and playwright and apart from the above two works, much of his writing has surfaced 'under the radar' and hasn't been the subject of much attention by either critics or fellow poets and writers. Beiles is someone whose quality of writing is as notoriously inconsistent as it is hard to track down and read his books in the first place.

One of his books of poetry, Yeoville, for example, was only published in a limitation of 4 copies.

What Beiles has in common with Burroughs is their meeting in Tangier and in Paris, an interest in drugs, an interest in experimental artists and writers and also, interestingly, a regular allowance from their families which allowed them both to focus much time on their writing.

I hope this book goes some way to revealing more about this great writer to the literary world. His poetry and plays have been criminally neglected and underrated and it is high time that his work is evaluated alongside many of the other great beat writers who are already firmly and undeniably well ensconced in the beat cannon and annals of history (in particular Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg).

Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska have done a terrific job of compiling these (mostly flattering) articles on Sinclair and his art. This is the best introduction to a little-known artist.

If you can obtain a copy, I recommend getting the second edition which is revised and expanded and contains an excellent bibliography-in-progress of Beiles' works in print.

Read the original post.

Sinclair Beiles and the Beat Generation

A new article about Sinclair Beiles has been published in New Frame, and Who was Sinclair Beiles?, which was published by Dye Hard Press, gets a mention.

The article starts: The 1950s were a tumultuous time for an Australian criminal and con artist called William Lindsay Pearson. An array of jewels was stolen from Brenthurst, the Johannesburg estate of the Oppenheimer family, founders of the Anglo American mining giant, in 1955. This treasure was, ultimately, derived from political connections to the apartheid state and the exploitation of Black workers.  ... read more.

Thunder in Pretoria

 Okay, so a posted copy of Thunder on the highway reached its destination in Pretoria three weeks later, which is not bad considering Pretoria is only 45 minutes' drive away. But I am chuffed to see it has pride of place on the same shelf as William Burroughs and Gregory Corso.

Rock and counterculture: an interview with Benoît Delaune

The latest issue of The Odd Magazine contains an interview with French musician, teacher and writer Benoît Delaune, conducted by Gary Cummiskey. 

Born in 1973, Delaune wrote his PhD about William Burroughs and the use of the cut-up technique in the ‘Nova Trilogy’. He also wrote a short biography of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, as well as theoretical texts and articles about the collage/montage aesthetics in literature, cinema and music. Between 1998 and 2003, he led a micro-publishing structure, Les éditions de la Notonecte, which released books by Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, FJ Ossang and others. As a musician, he played in many avant-garde bands, close to free-rock and  improvisation. Nowadays he plays guitar, composes and creates artworks for his new band, Orgöne. He's also working on books by Claude Pélieu and Alain Jégou.

You can read the interview here, in both English and French.

A Dye Hard Interview: Lee Beckworth: Poetry should be a way of avoiding commodification and superficiality

Lee Beckworth aka Lee Kwo was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1952/He started writing at 17 and completed a Degree at Deakin University in creative writing and Journalism in 1974/After travels in Europe he moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Letters in literature and psychology at Melbourne University/ He has published five works of fiction and two books of poetry/ His interests in music and photography have been expressed through the band Kicks and an exhibition of collages and photography in 2016/

You are an artist, a writer and musician, but which medium do you consider the most important, or do they each carry the same weight?

Well for me they all contribute to each other and each has a period of time where my lifestyle is dominated by one or other of them respectively/I have made performance videos using original music and photo images and I have used art works as covers  for published books and collages/I wrote lyrics for bands I was playing with and usually remained active in all creative areas including sculpture and photography ...Read more

'Poetry should be a way of resisting commodification and superficiality': An interview with Lee Beckworth by Gary Cummiskey

Writer artist and musician Lee Beckworth aka Lee Kwo was born in Geelong in 1952/He started writing at 17 and completed a Degree at Deakin University in creative writing and Journalism in 1974/After travels in Europe he moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Letters in literature and psychology at Melbourne University/ He has published 5 works of fiction and 2 books of poetry/ His interests in music and photography have been expressed through the band Kicks and an exhibition of collages and photography in 2016/

You can read the interview with Lee at The Odd Magazine.

'Anything can happen ..' An interview with French poet and collagist Bruno Sourdin by Gary Cummiskey

GC: You were born in 1950, so I am curious about what it was like being a young man in the late 1960s and and early 1970s. It was the end of the idealism of the 1960s and the beginning of something new in the 1970s, though maybe people did not yet know what the 1970s would be like.

BS: We cannot refer to this period without mentioning the impact of the May Revolution of 1968 in France and how liberating it was for a whole generation I grew up with. I was barely 18 years old. It was both a rejection of the consumer society, a protest against knowledge, a revolutionary moment of illusion and a much-needed change of life. I can remember in those days the academic poets spoke like mandarins. We were on the brink of asphyxia. It was a pitiful old film, pathetic and especially very annoying. Poetry had lost its luminous glow. We lived those May 1968 events as emancipation — many slogans which seemed to come straight from a surrealist poetry book could be seen anywhere: “Under cobblestones is the beach”, “It is forbidden to forbid”, “Run away my friend, this old world is behind you”… Read more plus view collages and read poems by Bruno Sourdin, followed by poems by Gary Cummiskey

Sinclair Beiles, le poète excentrique du Beat Hotel, by Bruno Sourdin

Né en 1930, le poète sud-africain Sinclair Beiles a vécu à Paris dans les années 50. Il travailla pour Olympia Press, la maison d’édition de Maurice Girodias, qui publiait en anglais des livres sulfureux et subversifs, à la fois des récits érotiques (dirty books) et des oeuvres interdites aux Etats-Unis (parmilesquelles Sexus d’Henry Miller, Lolita de Nabokov et Naked Lunch de William Burroughs). Sinclair lui-même a édité un roman érotique, Houses of Joy, sous le pseudonyme de Wu Wu Ming. Read more

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places

Dye Hard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on Minutes to Go with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso, and helped to shepherd Burroughs’ manuscript of Naked Lunch into print at the Paris-based Olympia Press, where he worked as an editor. “Best known” is a questionable term, though. If he was known at all, it was only among a certain segment of avant-garde expatriate writers and artists living in Tangier, Paris, London, Rotterdam, Athens, and other far-flung places, where he spent many years scraping by in various capacities....Read more

Cut Up! An anthology inspired by the cut-up method of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin

Coming soon from Oneiros Books, UK. Contains extracts from April in the Moon-Sun by Gary Cummiskey and a cut-up letter by Sinclair Beiles. Read more here

William Burroughs/ Local Stop on the Nova Express

Published by Inkblot Publications, Rhode Island, USA. 

Contact Aftermath Books at orders@aftermathbooks.com for more information.  

William S Burroughs: Our Spiritual Destiny is in Space, an interview with William Weiss

Published by Beat Scene Press, Coventry, England

William S. Burroughs' unforgettable characters

William S Burroughs' unforgettable characters. Essay by Michael Spann, text by Burroughs. Published by Inkblot Publications, 2013.

A review of Who was Sinclair Beiles?

Before I opened Dye Hard Press‘ new volume, its title, Who was Sinclair Beiles? was a question I certainly didn’t know the answer to. His is a name I’ve occasionally come across, as a poet who, as a resident of Paris’ famous “Beat Hotel,” created cut-ups with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso, and helped to edit Naked Lunch and as a resident of the famed “Beat Hotel” in Paris. But there’s where my knowledge stopped.

Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska have brought together a collection of eleven essays and interviews which address the question, “Who Was Sinclair Beiles?” from multiple angles....Read more here

A Moving Target - Encounters with William Burroughs

Published by Beat Scene Press, Coventry, UK.

So Who Owns Death TV? by William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner

So Who Own Death TV? by William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner. Collages by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Liam O'Gallagher. Published in 1967 by Beach Books, Texts and Documents 

Perhaps writers are actually readers...

"Perhaps writers are actually readers from hidden books. These books are carefully concealed and surrounded by deadly snares. It is a dangerous expedition to find one of these books and bring back a few words." - William Burroughs, introduction to Alexander Trocchi's Man at Leisure.

Tornado Alley by William S Burroughs

Illustrations by S Clay Wilson, published by Cherry Valley Editions, 1989.