This was an influential publication in a pre-internet era where finding anything about these people was difficult. Vale bridged the gap from punk to beat writers and performance artists by working at City Lights Bookstore handling mailorder catalogs.

Gysin was obscure and relatively unknown, and even Burroughs was pretty off the radar for most people. And Throbbing Gristle was dissolving and barely even heard of, but also notorious for their last live performance in San Francisco.

I think this was where Re/Search made the leap to paperback books, evolved from being a newsprint paper 'for the first issues. While Vale was deeply in the SF punk scene he also helped broaden horizions in the first issues by turning me on to Fela, James Blood Ulmer and a broad spectrum of stuff that was beyond the idea of calling it a post-punk zine.

The rest of the Re/Search series was equally relevant. I'd argue that this book and Vale helped promote all of these artists to the point where they became legendary cult figures, as they deserved to be. This is the foundation of the publishing and info distribution network Vale created that promoted the idea of an evolving industrial culture - the blend of some essence of punk, post-punk, performance art, world music and paying respects to the influences that Burroughs and Gysin had in creating Dream Machines and tape cutups and editing.

Burroughs was really barely known beyond people already into the beats. Naked Lunch was considered unreadable by anyone I knew.

Throbbing Gristle was surprisingly more complicated in intent and influences than met the eye and this exposed a history with connections to mail art, Fluxus, performance art and some pretty disgusting performance things pushing boundaries sexually and psychologically. They're the bridge from Burroughs, who was sparked with audio edit experiments by Gysin, and TG took some of the ideas and ran with it.

The posthumous backstory on TG here laid them out as the godfathers of industrial music, putting it in a Dadaistic and art context that made these guys heroes to many people looking to explore the fringes of culture and art via the boundary pushing areas these people covered. ( )