Steven Stapleton & Christoph Heemann - Painting With Priests (rec. 2009, rel. 2015)

If you enjoyed the Tibor Szemző post the other day, here's the album that made me discover Snapshot From The Island, due to the samples used by Mr NWW and Mr HNAS on this concert recording.  Performed in the Ancient Synagogue in Ivrea, Turin on 21st November 2009, this one-off collaborative gig saw these two old hands at disquieting soundscaping doing what they do best.

Dark ambient throbbing, jump-scare piano, sampled footsteps and other odd noises and voices - that's just the first few minutes, but you know what to expect from then on, notwithstanding the seemingly oddly placed, but effectively recast samples of Szemző.  Occasionally, those samples will provide a fleeting rhythmic drive, or some other noise will repeat into a rhythm of sorts, but otherwise this is formless dark ambience of the highest order by a couple of masters at conjuring up this sort of thing.  Headphones, dark room - you know the drill.

Alternate cover, used for LP edition

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Hirsche Nichts Aufs Sofa - Melchior (Aufmarsch Der Schlampen) (1986)

Zipping backwards again to the 80s Nurse With Wound universe, with an album that Steven Stapleton participated in, helped to produce, and released on United Dairies.  Having discovered kindred spirits in the moose-banning-from-sofas German surrealists who were releasing dada-esque, next-generation-Faust sounding cassettes and recording records in sewers, Stapleton invited the duo of Christoph Heeman and Achim Flaam and their entourage over to London to record an album for his label.

With a subtitle that now feels oddly prescient of 2010s sexual politics - but who knows what it meant to HNAS in 1986, if anything - Melchior was the result.  The first side of the album featured four tracks that mostly ran into each other, so can effectively be taken as one suite (albeit one of mind-boggling variety) much the same way as the 22-minute piece that filled side two.  The English translations of the track titles, respectively Roast me on an open fire, In summer there's no food, Without hesitation the goose won the cigarette, Cattle without socks and Heavyweight in evening dress, give an indication of the HNAS bizarre humour, and their music.

Starting with a jerky, echoey campfire singalong (Brate Mich auf offenem Feuer), a stomping, single-chord rock groove with a nice little keyboard figure is up next (Im Sommer gibt's nix zu Essen), and irresistible chaos ensues.  Whenever something resembling an actual song gets going, HNAS can be relied on to pull it apart at the first opportunity, descending into jokey hollerings of the track title, tape-manipulated electronic smears and out-of-focus clanks, rattles and piano plinking.  Even a drum-machine track complete with 'handclap' function gets chucked in, before being derailed with more gleeful taunting, brass-instrument samples and synth buzzes.

The aforementioned side-long Tonnenschwer im Abendkleid saves the best for last, IMO.  A queasy, echoing loop (perhaps a bell or suchlike) establishes itself, filled out by foggy smears of brass a la Cosey Fanni Tutti circa 1980.  Eventually this is blown away by a chaotic, very NWW-like middle section, until the entry of the distorted bass note and drums that take us towards the end.  A phenomenal epic track to cap off a fascinating, memorable record.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Im Schatten Der Möhre

Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa - Im Schatten Der Möhre (1987)

"I remember Steven Stapleton [Nurse With Wound] telling me he'd discovered this great new band that sounded like Faust. They're called "Moose Without A Sofa" or something like that in German - he went on. You're going to love them. He was right."
(Alan (or maybe Steve) Freeman, Ultima Thule Record Shop and Auricle label/magazine)

Whether you translate H.N.A.S.'s full name as above, or as 'Moose Not Allowed On Sofa", "Deer Not On Sofa" and so on, it was a great name for Christoph Heeman and Achim P. Li Khan to pick for such a surreal adventure in sound between 1983 and 1992.  As above, there's echoes of Faust from the decade before them, and their kinship with Stapleton is audibly clear as well. 

Im Schatten Der Möhre (In the shadow of the carrot) is probably their best album, and to my ears it actually prefigures the NWW sound of the 90s, especially Colder Still from Thunder Perfect Mind, or all of Who Can I Turn To Stereo - an icy sonic wasteland full of disembodied voices, wisps of clanking, clattering percussion, and occasionally a near-semblance of a song or at least an identifiable instrument.  A perfect example here is Die Nacht Der Grünen Götterspeise (The night of green jelly) - after bits of distant piano, some recognisable guitars appear.  The track threatens to resolve into a normal song structure but never gets there, and everything remains swathed in a fog of distorted electronics and other noises.

Mention must be made of Erst Geht Die Kuh..., the album's definite highlight for me.  Amidst sounds of running water and a Jew's harp, fragments of an ominous, Residents-esque call-and-response nursery rhyme keep creeping in, and the track ends on a mocking, laughing-singing rendition.  The title seems to refer to "First comes the cow, then the guest..."- a Black Forest-region aphorism about rural...tourism? overdevelopment? farming in decline?  For a self-confessed Germanophile, you'd think I'd make a proper effort to learn the language at some point rather than relying on various web translators that never quite agree with each other.

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Source for quote - a discogs comment on the album prior to this one.