Nurse With Wound - To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl (1980)

As mentioned in the previous post, one huge fan of Berrocal's Parallèles was NWW's Steven Stapleton.  The two men first met in France in the late 70s, and again shortly afterwards in London, where Berrocal contributed to the second album that Stapleton's band (still a group at this early stage, although John Fothergill and Heman Pathak's involvement was already diminishing) were recording.

In common with their legendary debut Chance Meeting..., NWW were again obliged (for the last time) to give engineer Nicky Rogers an introductory guest spot on guitar, entitled Umbrella Link.  Other than that, Stapleton's increasing confidence in the studio was already starting to show, in the slowed-down voice and various bits of electronic noise in the early minutes of She Alone Hole And Open, not to mention the various trumpet smears (Berrocal), other odds and ends, and the hammering rhythmic ending.

Ostranenie, named after the Russian art movement and also taking up a full album side, is better still, with the sonic landscape really starting to open out in anticipation of studio fever-dreams like Homotopy To Marie.  Disembodied voices, echoing percussive sounds, a lengthy exploration of a musical box rendition of Schumann's Traumerei, and a straight 90-second lift from John Cage (who was given a "grateful acknowledgement" in the liner notes) all take their turn in haunting the soundscape.  In the latter case, the choppy piano and radio play drop-ins from Credo In Us (the early 70s recording by Ensemble Musica Negativa) sound completely at home in their surroundings.  It's one of those great testaments to Stapleton's developing art and how skillfully he could synthesise his influences.

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Jacques Berrocal - Parallèles (1977)

Debut solo album by French avant-gardist and multiple-horn skronker Jac(ques) Berrocal.  This is the one with the original Rock 'N' Roll Station, memorably covered by Nurse With Wound in 1994.  Back in 1976, Berrocal got on his bike (in the studio, to record the sounds of it as an instrument) and left the words to British rock 'n' roll singer Vince Taylor, whose biggest audience had always been in mainland Europe since his 60s peak.  The result, accompanied by a pedaling bass note, was five minutes of surrealist brilliance - 18 years later, Stapleton would even name his album after it.

Elsewhere on Parallèles, there's a sample of the free jazz improvisations on trumpet, trombone, cornet and more that Berrocal and his main collaborators Roger Ferlet and Michel Potage were playing at the time.  One track, Post-Card, adds guitar and a spoken-word part, and was apparently recorded in a pigsty.

Lastly, the side-long Bric-a-Brac (To Russolo) adds some more free-improv acquaintances on cello, bass, piano and several more horns.  Towards the end, that static bassline from Rock 'N' Roll Station comes back in, as do elements of its lyrics, among other things that intrude hilariously into an English-language biographical note of Luigi Russolo.

original LP cover

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