Lyric Writing

Cut-Up Machine

Bowie and Burroughs's cut-up technique — paste any text, cut it into fragments, shuffle and rearrange to discover unexpected lyrics. Click fragments to pin, discard or drag them into a new order. Pure chance, no AI.

Source Text
Cut Mode
0 words
The method: David Bowie kept a program called the Verbasizer on his Mac that did exactly this — cut text into fragments and rearranged them randomly. He used it on every album from Outside onwards. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin invented the technique in the 1960s using scissors and newspaper. The magic is in the collision of unrelated phrases — meanings emerge that your conscious mind would never have written.
Assembled Result
Click any fragment below to add it here. Click again to remove it.
Fragments click to add · click again to remove · right-click to discard
Paste source text and hit Cut & Shuffle

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