The Verbasizer was a digital version of an approach to lyrical writing that Bowie had been using for decades, called the cut-up technique. 'So what you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.'Īn excerpt of the lyrics from the song Hallo Spaceboy, off Bowie's 1995 album Outside, which is said to have been mostly written with and inspired by the output of a piece of custom-made text randomization software. And it'll take those 20 sentences and cut in between them all the time, picking out, choosing different words from different columns, and from different rows of sentences.' 'It'll take the sentence, and I'll divide it up between the columns, and then when I've got say, three or four or five-sometimes I'll go as much as 20, 25 different sentences going across here, and then I'll set it to randomize.
