This single consists of three bonus remixes originally included with the 1997 reissue of Material’s 1989 classic SEVEN SOULS. Featuring William S. Burroughs reading from his 1987 novel THE WESTERN LANDS amid a congregation of electronics and amplified instruments, it concentrates the author’s ruminations of mortality in primordial soundscapes. Bill Laswell’s “The Western Lands (A Dangerous Road Mix)” opens a third eye in the text and treads a fragile line between being and nonbeing. Contributions by Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, and Tetsu Inoue uncover hidden layers of interpretation between Burroughs’s striped exposition, even as dangers imbue the breath of promise with decay. An overwhelming sense of aridness pervades, the kiss of sun on soil. Through this initiation, fear is no longer a variable of the reality equation, knowable only through the aerial perspective compelled by these terrestrial impulses.

The overall effect is such that when we get to the remix of “Seven Souls” by Tim Simenon (a.k.a. Bomb the Bass), words that were once internal now feel external, beats once external now internal. Changes of alignment are born through the sacred names spun from Burroughs’s verbal threads, and by which Simenon casts nets of water across untrodden dunes. Thus, he brings an appropriate distance to these utterances, as if dancing in a comfort zone of abreaction. Every beat resounds as the footstep of one who seeks the spoken word: a prophet with half a body, at once within and without the drums.

All that’s left to engrave our ears is “Soul Killer (Remote Control Mix),” a remix by Terre Thaemlitz. This relatively ambient outing finds Burroughs flitting in and out of perception. Hints of melody and subliminal hums gradually coalesce into a pixelated frond of awareness through which the nocturnal desert folds in on itself until the sky becomes the road beneath our feet. And the more we walk, the farther we get from a destination that has been inside us all along.