Beat Soundtrack #21: Thomas Antonic

In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music

Thomas Antonic is an award-winning poet, musician, writer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who holds a PhD in German Literature and Philosophy. He works mainly in the fields of experimental literature, multi-media intersections of poetry, film, music, visual arts, cut-up, improvisation, spontaneous prose and other principles of coincidence.

He has numerous publications to his name, in German and English, most recently: United States of Absurdia or The Glorification of the Golden West (poetry and prose, 2022), ‘Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37’ (essay, 2020), Wolfgang Bauer (biography, German, 2018), Flickering Cave Paintings of Noxious Nightbirds (poetry, bilingual, 2017). His most recent LP with his band William S. Burroughs Hurts is entitled Fat Cat Bonfire (Moloko, 2019). In autumn 2022 he will release a new LP with his band Heumond aus Mitteleuropa.

Antonic is currently conducting the research project ‘The Transnational Beat Generation in Austria’ at the University of Vienna. He was Visiting Researcher at Stanford University in 2013 and Research Fellow at the University of California in Berkeley in 2014 and 2015. He lives and works mostly in Vienna, Austria. In 2021, he completed his first feature length documentary film, ruth weiss: One More Step West Is the Sea.

What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?

Let’s talk rock to start with. From the age of 16 onwards I played drums in a rock band called Heumond aus Mitteleuropa in a small Austrian town where I grew up. Martin Urban, the singer of the band, who was (and still is!) two years older than me, gave me a copy of On the Road for my 17th birthday.

I read a lot as a teenager. Among my favourites back then were Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Gustav Meyrink, Nikolai Gogol, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Seneca, Dante, Aleister Crowley, P.D. Ouspensky and many obscure German-language writers who would not make sense to mention here, just to give you a glimpse of what kind of teenager I was.

I also had a preference for darker music. So, we’re talking about the 1990s. In my school there were maybe three groups: The ones who listened to Nirvana and all this grunge stuff, the ones who listened to hip hop, and the ones who liked bad pop music that was constantly played on the radio.

Now and then someone had a hippie phase and listened to the Beatles, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel. And then there was this weirdo who listened to Einstürzende Neubauten and Nurse with Wound, and who played in a band who quoted Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium and Jean Améry’s On Suicide in their song lyrics, who composed songs by making use of Bach’s most diabolic chord progressions. That was me.

So you can imagine what attracted me when first encountering On the Road, after reading mainly the aforementioned sombre authors: Here was a novel that, instead of being stricken by weltschmerz, celebrated life in a most exciting way. That was very new and attractive to me because like many people – especially in the German-speaking world – I’ve always had the deluded concept that good literature has to be highbrow and austere (As a teenager I didn’t even grasp the humour of Kafka).

In fact, for a while the lead singer Martin and me mutated into a weird rural Austrian real-life version of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, probably much to the irritation and provocation of the townspeople. The big difference was that we weren’t really into jazz all that much (for me this came much later), but we loved all kinds of obscure rock music and in contrast to Paradise and Moriarty even played the music onstage ourselves.

So, for this reason, Kerouac will always have a special, sentimental place in my life, or at least on my bookshelf. Although, 25 years after my first encounter with it, I think that On the Road is, just like many of Hermann Hesse’s books, fiction for young adults that isn’t as effective, or have the same effect, when you get older. Visions of Cody, for example, is far more interesting to me because of its composition and style.

Anyway, if you’re fond of a book, you do your homework and learn more about its author, find out who he’s associated with (which wasn’t easy back then because I didn’t have access to internet and hadn’t started studying literature at the university yet), and find out that the characters in the book are fictionalised versions of real individuals, among them Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

So, soon after On the Road I started reading Ginsberg’s poems and Naked Lunch, the cut-up trilogy, Junkie, Cities of the Red Night, and, it turned out that for me, Burroughs was the real gem, the link between the list of writers I gave you earlier and the Beat attitude of Kerouac, if I may say so. At least that’s how I saw it back then.

Through the years I discovered so many writers connected to the Beat movement that it’s really hard to name only a few favourite works. But among the writers whose works I have appreciated for a long time now, besides the “Beat triumvirate”, are definitely ruth weiss (name always lower case), Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and so on.

And you can expand this list, depending on your definition of “Beat” and who you consider part of the movement, to include Richard Brautigan, Bob Dylan, Jack Hirschman and numerous poets from other countries who recently have been associated with the Beats due to the influence of transnational Beat studies.

What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?

I think you know that better than I do, because you’re the expert on this subject. But the first thing that comes to mind is the high esteem that young East Coast group of Beats had for bebop and the effect it had on their writing. The rhythm of their poetry, the improvised character (similar to jazz) of both Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s style – ‘First thought = best thought’ – is the only way to improvise on a musical instrument because you can’t stop and ponder over what would be the best note to play next.

Of course, the relationship between Burroughs and the many musicians who admired him is very fascinating, ranging from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth, along with musicians like David Bowie, Kurt Cobain or Thom Yorke, who adapted the cut-up method for writing song lyrics.

But undoubtedly also those who were inspired by the cut-up technique in their music, like Throbbing Gristle, COIL, or Nurse with Wound, to name just a few. And then all these band names and song titles derived from Burroughs’ titles, character names, phrases, even my own band William S. Burroughs Hurts. Additionally, Burroughs on the Sgt. Pepper cover, Burroughs in a music video of one of the worst bands on the planet, i.e. U2 (for which I will never forgive him). And so on…

As the biographer of ruth weiss, I also intensely studied the history of jazz & poetry, a genre that she ‘innovated’, as she put it, in 1949 in Chicago. She was the first to perform jazz & poetry in San Francisco, and she was doing that as early as 1956, well before everyone else. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth saw her performing at the Cellar, copied her and released their Poetry Readings in The Cellar record in 1957, without giving her credit. But for decades they were considered the inventors of jazz & poetry.

Kerouac followed their example in 1959 with Poetry for the Beat Generation and Blues and Haikus and made the genre hugely popular. ruth weiss was never mentioned in that context and only released some of her own performances decades later.

Pictured above: Thomas Antonic photographed by Jana Madzigon, ©2021. Note that the black-and-white image at the head of this article is ©Rhianna Gallagher.

As a writer, musician and academic have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?

I can’t deny that. My main academic work has focused on the Beats for many years now. Since 2017, I’ve been conducting a research project on transnational connections between Austrian literature and the Beat movement at the University of Vienna. This has also (inevitably) inspired parts of my writing. I occasionally experiment with cut-ups and I’d say my poetry and song lyrics share a certain ‘Beat attitude’.

I also like to perform my poetry live with musicians, though until now I’ve never done so with jazz musicians. I prefer experimental sounds, noise, ambient. Also, improvisation plays a big part in my writing, live readings and music. Still, I wouldn’t consider myself anything like a ‘post-Beat’ writer, per se.

Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links with the Beat Generation – and how?

I already gave a few examples above. I think you could write several books on that subject. Again, you yourself already did a great job with your volume Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll, but even those 500 pages can only partially answer this question.

I personally consider the rap genre in many ways to be a sort of successor to jazz & poetry, to a certain degree, especially when it comes to highly artistic wordsmiths like Saul Williams or Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, who, by the way, both not only perform their lyrics to hip hop music (if you can still refer to Moor Mother’s experimental sounds as being hip hop) but also occasionally to jazz.

Saul Williams worked with David Murray, the latter having performed jazz & poetry with Amiri Baraka in the early 1980s. Moor Mother collaborated with Roscoe Mitchell and the group Irreversible Entanglements. So, in that respect, you can certainly see how thin the lines between the genres are.

Generally speaking, the Beats had such a huge impact on music that there are links almost everywhere, be it directly, like Jim Morrison who idolised Kerouac, or indirectly, as so many musicians who idolised Morrison and the Doors and may not necessarily have known of Morrison’s Beat influence. Or musicians in the fields of punk, post-punk, industrial, etc., who read Burroughs. And let’s not even get started with Ginsberg’s admirer Bob Dylan and his after effects in folk and pop music!

Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?

Your questions aren’t getting any easier. There are so many singers, musicians, bands I like – and from all kinds of genres. And I’ve already mentioned, especially in pop, rock and folk music, you can clearly see representations of Beat ideas and attitudes very often, but many times you can only speculate whether there is a direct link one way or the other.

To be honest, I don’t read a lot of biographies about musicians I like, not even interviews. It is indeed sometimes very interesting to learn that a particular musician, for example Bowie, has been influenced by Burroughs’ and Gysin’s cut-up technique. But that doesn’t have an effect on whether I like a musician (or band) or not.

To briefly answer the first part of the question – some of my all-time favourites are such diverse artists as Bob Dylan, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion, Ingram Marshall, Einstürzende Neubauten, Strangulated Beatoffs, Grand Ulena, Brian Eno, Modest Mouse, COIL, Jason Molina’s bands Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., Robbie Bâsho, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue…

Add to that Wire, Matt Elliott, Can, Cluster, Circle, Steamhammer, Silver Jews, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Howlin’Wolf, Fred Frith, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Syd Barrett, Henryk Górecki and Franz Liszt. And Bach, of course. And Renaissance composer William Byrd.

And among the favourites in my current playlist are Jessica Moss, Tara Nome Doyle, Courtney Barnett, Gavin Bryars, Swans, The Angels of Light, Kevin Morby, Nina Nastasia, Mazzy Star, James Blackshaw, early American folk music, and I still discover some interesting stuff on the infamous NWW (Nurse with Wound) List. And I could go on like this for a very long time…!

Note: Details of Thomas Antonic’s research project can be found here: https://www.univie.ac.at/germanistik/projekt/transnational-literature-austria-beat-generation-2/

The ruth weiss film website can be visited at this address: https://ruth-weiss.com

Discover more about the NWW List here: https://www.stereogum.com/2057432/the-nurse-with-wound-list-at-40-a-beginners-guide/columns/sounding-board/