cut-up technique

British  

noun

1. a technique of writing involving cutting up lines or pages of prose and rearranging these fragments, popularized by the novelist William Burroughs (1914–97)

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Example Sentences

Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique.

From New York Times

The collection also features Brian Eno's EMS synthesizer, used on Bowie's 1977 albums Low and Heroes; and examples of his "cut-up" technique for lyric writing, which involved literally chopping up existing texts to generate new meanings from the rearranged pieces.

From BBC

Like many of Burroughs’s rock progeny, Bowie was an adherent of the cut-up technique that originated with the Surrealists but was popularized in the late 1950s by Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin.

From Washington Post

He even borrowed some of Burroughs’s methods, riffing on Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique in his own verse.

From The New Yorker

The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs’s and Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique to their own flesh.

From New York Times