Nurse With Wound - Creakiness And Other Misdemeanours (2012 compilation, rec. 1991-2005)

A bit of a strange compilation, even by Steven Stapleton's standards.  Creakiness, his 17-minute collage of cartoon-inspired zaniness, had already featured on the Sugar Fish Drink compilation in 1992 (it first appeared as half of a split LP in 1991).  It was still great to have Creakiness back in circulation in 2012, at a time when Sugar Fish Drink was out of print, and it's one of his most fun adventures in sound that always deserves a wider audience.  What was odd this time around was Stapleton's decision to fill out the disc with half an hour of offcuts from his 'Echo Poeme' dark ambient project from 2005, and a single B-side from 2004.  It's all great music though, and hey, who ever said Nurse With Wound had to make any sense.

link
pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister 
Soliloquy For Lilith
A Sucked Orange / Scrag
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Man With The Woman Face
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Nurse With Wound - Man With The Woman Face (2002)

Since Steven Stapleton recently compiled all his "Trippin' Musik" from last year into a box set (that I've yet to explore), why not take a trip back to one of his most eerily psychedelic albums from the early 2000s.  Featuring just three tracks in a succinct 38 minutes, Man With The Woman Face was in hindsight a subtle, understated prelude to the hallucinatory madness unleashed with the Angry Eelectric Finger series.

Beware The African Mosquito (Ring Your Doorbell, Put You To Sleep) is the first extended fever dream that develops from a gently pulsing drone and fluttering, clattering sounds.  Bell tones, snatches of voice and more gradually fill out the lysergic landscape into one of NWW's most striking album openers for some time.   

Ag Canadh Thuas Sa Spèir (Up in the sky, singing) is based around more drones and electronic tones, smudged into a blend of unsettling electronic muck and robotic voice.  Six minutes in, snatches of a full-on Amon Düül style freakout suddenly disrupt, before leaving behind electronic chirruping.  The final 15 minutes plus of White Light From The Stars In Your Mind (A Paramechanical Development) take in even more of a krautrock influence, with a straightup (if speed-shifted) borrowing from early Amon Düül over another pulsing dronescape.  One of the most hypnotic and satisfying NWW records.

link
pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister 
Soliloquy For Lilith
A Sucked Orange / Scrag
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Nurse With Wound - A Sucked Orange/Scrag (2012 reiss of compis from 1989 & 87)

A clearout exercise by Steven Stapleton, in which piles of tape offcuts destined for the bin were salvaged at a friend's suggestion and released in a Faust Tapes-style random collage.  The first attempt at this appeared in 1987 as a 28-minute cassette entitled Scrag, which wouldn't be digitally reissued until this double-CD edition in 2012.  Stapleton then fleshed out the concept to album-length in 1990, and called it A Sucked Orange, with one of his most eye-popping, memorable album covers.

The "bits and bobs" of tape were often worn and frayed from experimental abuse undertaken in the process of creating the early NWW records. Indeed, anyone familiar with Homotopy To Marie, Sylvie & Babs and Spiral Insana will recognise the sound of these albums starting to come together in occasional fragments.  Elsewhere, Stapleton has a go at a Steve Reich-esque tape phase experiment with a fragment of Trout Mask Replica, records various friends singing (or attempting to, and fluffing it), and much more.  In the end, he managed to create not just an outtakes compilation but a thoroughly enjoyable Nurse With Wound album in its own right from detritus that was about to end up as landfill.

Disc 1 (A Sucked Orange) link
Disc 2 (Scrag) link
pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister
Soliloquy For Lilith
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Nurse With Wound - Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's (1983)

Last Friday's selection from the NWW List reminded me that there's been no postings of Mr S himself for quite some time.  So here's some prime early emanations from the haunted house, which sit chronologically in the list below between Homotopy To Marie and Sylvie & Babs.  Stapleton had just met one of his lifelong friends and major collaborators in David Tibet, and this album (often regarded as a mini-album due to its notable brevity compared to most other NWW releases) marked their first time working together.

Stapleton puts Tibet's voice to good use straight away, mangling it into a ghostly hall of mirrors whilst his own clangs and drones from the Homotopy era continue to evolve.  Sped up bits of music, buzzing, creaking and much more fill out the ten minutes of Several Odd Moments Prior To Lunch.  Other, female phantoms are also present, and the whole thing showcases Stapleton's increasing skills in mixing, editing and contrasting dynamics.  Following Tibet's intonation about wild beasts, we're straight into the queasy horns, piano stabs and banjo loops of Phenomenon Of Aquarium And Bearded Lady for another five minutes of classic early NWW.

Taking up the whole of Side 2 on the original LP (for the shortlived Disques Du Crepuscle sub-label LAYLAH) is Dirty Fingernails.  Opening with some of the noisiest NWW outside of Stapleton's earliest collaborations, it only lets up occasionally for more playful or atmospheric sounds.  Eventually, a period of near silence gives way to more scraping and slurping, before an epic crashing and swirling finish.

Until 2007, vinyl was the only way to hear Gyllensköld in its entirety, as only remixed and shortened versions, known as Odd, Aquarium and the third track at least keeping its title intact, appeared on a couple of NWW compilations.  Odd was the most strikingly different, highlighting the more musical aspects of the track in under three minutes, Aquarium was the most similar with the rhythm more pronounced, and the reworked Dirty Fingernails managed to add in some more NWW scraps that also appeared on Stapleton's 1989 clearout exercise A Sucked Orange (must post that sometime).  All three are appended as bonus tracks to the original versions on this 2007 CD reissue.

link
pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister
Soliloquy For Lilith
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Nurse With Wound - Paranoia In Hi-Fi: Earworms 1978-2008 (2009 compilation)

As a 30th anniversary celebration, NWW issued this 78-minute single-track (some pressings did have apparently meaningless track divisions) career-spanning mix.  In tribute to the Faust Tapes, it was to be a special low-priced one-off, and it was indeed 99p that I paid for the CD (the green tray edition) in early 2009.

The track begins with a radio introduction from which Stapleton extracted the slogan "Think jazz, think punk attitude", before going into Coolorta Moon, I Don't Want To Have Easy Listening Nightmares, bits of Sylvie & Babs... in other words, some of Stapleton's most zany, colourful creations to draw the listener in.  Some more recent NWW material (plus bits of 1982's Astral Dustbin Dirge) follows, then bits of Spiral Insana, bits of Rock & Roll Station, and much much more, before ending on a more ambient stretch including Salt Marie Celeste and some Lilith drones.  If you want to spend an hour plus reveling in the brain-frying majesty of NWW's first thirty years, this is way to do it.

link
pw: sgtg

Nurse With Wound - Lumb's Sister (2014 compi, rec. 1986-7)

Long overdue some NWW here, so here's one that I've been listening to a lot on the dark evenings.  Originally written as a film soundtrack - the director's eventual choice of alternate music gets a good-natured "aw shucks" from Stapleton in the brief liner note - Lumb's Sister is classic mid-80s Nurse With Wound.

All the expected ingredients are present: huge, formless chasms of ambient sound from which emerge creakings, groanings, occasional soft and ominous rhythms, and so forth.  A selection of Lumb recordings were released as part of a 3LP box set in 1989, shared with Current 93 and Sol Invictus; Stapleton then took an informal run at a reissue circa 2012, which appeared on a few CDRs, before this definitive collection was released in 2014. 

It can probably be taken as a given, knowing the artist's predilection for remixing himself, that at least some of the material was smartened up for final release, but it certainly all sounds fantastic and has an album-like consistency.  As a bonus, Coil appear on Stapleton's remix of How To Destroy Angels.

link
pw: sgtg

Nurse With Wound - Alice The Goon (expanded edition 2000, orig. rel. 1995)

Steven Stapleton in fun mode, with an extended bit of darkness never far away.  This EP was originally released as a 2-track, single-sided 12" limited to 500 copies, at a festival in France, and was "inspired by a lurid Popeye cartoon" which is the source of its name.  On the opening track, (I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares, a chugging rumba loop is the basis for nine minutes of thoroughly enjoyable chaos, as the loop is overlaid with electronic noise and an insane guitar solo.  The rhythm of the loop is occasionally shifted by a delay effect, until a voice announces "It's so easy, baby... easy... easy..." to draw things to a close.

The second track, Prelude To Alice The Goon, is all atmospheric bass and guitar rumbles, eerie effects and a creepy, goonlike voice cooing as if discovering a shipwrecked human to drag off to a subterranean cave where an echoing, percussive ritual commences.  On the CD reissue, a third track was added and left untitled, but for obvious reasons has become informally known as Alice The Goon.  This track is the most minimal, with only the ghostly atmosphere remaining from the Prelude.  All in all, a really enjoyable, bitesize half hour of prime NWW.  Easy, baby.

link

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

link

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.

link

Nurse With Wound - Soliloquy For Lilith (1988)

Been meaning to post this one for a while now.  What to even say about one of the monumental epics of pure electronic drone, that arose from an accident of technological serendipity and remains the artist's favourite in his vast catalogue?

Simply put, the 106 minutes of Soliloquy For Lilith (now expanded to 2½ hours by outtake and/or remixed material) are an object lesson in chancing upon a simple technical quirk - a closed loop of effects pedals undergoing subtle electromagnetic changes as the air above them is disturbed - and crafting that single idea into a masterpiece.

Stapleton found that he could "play" this setup, theremin-like, to manipulate the huge, swirling soundwaves and ghostly overtones that comprise the six-part Soliloquy, and split the different sounding sections into six sides of vinyl, each 17-18 minutes in length.  In parts 1 & 2, the massive drone draws you in to its hypnotic orbit whilst the overtones stab and shriek in the vastness of space; in parts 3 & 4, the overtones have become almost melodic, resulting in an almost ambient bath in primordial sound.  Simply one of the greatest immersive listening experiences ever made.

Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3

Nurse With Wound - A Missing Sense (1997 compilation)

As promised on Monday's writeup, here's Steven Stapleton's 'tribute' to Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing.  Over to you, Steve:

"A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building. I decided to make my own version using the basic structure of Ashley's masterpiece, but making it more personal, adding natural sound that I could hear in my environment. It should be played at very low volume."

What we get with the NWW take on Automatic Writing then, might be 20 minutes shorter, but is still a wonderful ambient drift that sits alongside the very best of Stapleton's work in that mode.  There's less focus on the vocalisations (I'd guess because they were very much Ashley's signature, and the best Stapleton could do was imitate them), but plenty of NWW signatures - electronic whirring and clicking, mutated smears of trumpet, and a highly atmospheric take on the Farsifa organ sound from Automatic Writing.  Far from being just a knockoff of a superior work, A Missing Sense is magical stuff in its own right - the influence from Ashley is obvious, but the NWW fingerprint is unmistakable.

On this compilation CD, A Missing Sense is followed by a work from a year later (1987) called Swansong.  Purportedly inspired by the anger and hopelessness felt by Stapleton after watching a documentary on the original A-bomb tests, it actually comes across as an oddly calming ambient work mostly comprised of electronically-generated rushing waves and eerie, distant synth melodies.  Near the end, the waves suddenly stop, and the remaining music introduces a bizarre interlude in which a girl (possibly the same one from the Homotopy To Marie title track?) talks about puberty or something like that.  The electronic waves then condense into a constant sea wall of static that gradually fades away.

Lastly, the disc is rounded out by a remixed version of Dadaˣ from Merzbild Schwet.  This mix originally appeared on Ostranenie 1913, released in 1983 to help a friend of Steve's launch their label, and is one of the few NWW records I've been lucky enough to get hold of on vinyl.  The LP cover was a monochrome version of what you can see above, that Stapleton used for the Missing Sense CD.  It's a good mix of Dadaˣ, but I think I still prefer the more spare and spacious original.

link

Nurse With Wound - Merzbild Schwet (1980)

Back into NWW formative history today, to June 1980.  With the friendships of the inaugural trio of Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak starting to drift apart, Merzbild Schwet was the first occasion on which Stapleton went into the studio alone.  With a growing confidence in finding his way around a mixing desk, and a singular vision that would establish NWW as Staplteton's project (plus whoever else he wanted to work with), Merzbild Schwet is really the start of the Nurse With Wound story proper (even if Stapleton prefers to start it with Homotopy To Marie, as the first one he was fully satisfied with).

Released later that year, Merzbild Schwet offered two 24-minute tracks, their titles (Futurismo and Dadaˣ) reflecting Stapleton's artistic interests, and one of his most wonderfully macabre album covers.  My CD, from a reissue box set, has this as the back cover - apparently a printer error.  The track titles seem to switch order between various editions too, confusing many a listener - to this day there's stuff on rateyourmusic.com about liking 'the post-apocalyptic story on Futurismo' - nope, that's Dadaˣ, but easy mistake to make... you start to wonder if Mr S did these sorts of things deliberately...

Futurismo, then, is the one that starts with the inspired gag of recording a record scratch into the piece, making buyers of the original vinyl think they had a defective copy - until it speeds up and becomes obvious it's part of the track.  The background for most of Futurismo is a mangled tape of a jazz band slowed down and slurred into a sort of tipsy queasiness, whilst various sounds gradually pile on.  Electronic noises, spoken voices, unraveling sticky tape, a smear of organ that eventually becomes quite pleasant when it radiates a full major chord... etc etc.  The last four minutes change tack entirely to choppy piano and humming static.

All great stuff, but Dadaˣ is arguably NWW's first dark drifting masterwork.  Eerie echoes of backwards percussion and assorted honks and creaks provide the backdrop for the main spoken monologue, performed by Eve Libertine of Crass.  This short, surreal piece about non-communication gets further reduced into fragments in between another voice speaking in French, stabs of piano, more skronking and howling, and periods of ominous silence before Libertine's full monologue repeats near the end.  A kind of ghostly accordion shanty finishes off a track of absolutely essential dark-room weirdness to be creeped out by.

link

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.

link

Previously posted at SGTG: Im Schatten Der Möhre

Nurse With Wound - The Surveillance Lounge (2009)

Jumping forward 28 years from last week's chaotic snapshot of young NWW at its most unfocused, we arrive at the laser-precision night terror that is The Surveillance Lounge.  Almost a distillation of all of Stapleton's greatest devices of creeping unease - disembodied voices, sinister drones, crackly record surface noise and other sounds best left unidentified - everything that made the likes of Homotopy To Marie, Colder Still from Thunder Perfect Mind and Salt Marie Celeste so memorable are deftly woven into what can only be described as quintessential Nurse With Wound.

This hour-plus modern masterpiece was divided into four tracks of roughly equal length, but sustains the same sepia-tinged house of horrors atmosphere throughout, so may as well be regarded as one long work in four movements.  It's not all formless, fearful drone though, with diversions aplenty: the fast section of The Golden Age Of Telekenesis, with its deranged horse-racing commentator (or bingo caller?) and immediate aftermath is a memorable highlight that reassures the listener that this isn't an album devoid of Stapleton's playful, absurdist sense of humour.

Other noisy onslaughts arrive at various odd moments, making The Surveillance Lounge recommendable as a headphones-in-dark-room experience only if you're game for the occasional jump-scare.  A gentle easy-listening sample offers only brief respite most times it appears, before the album blindfolds you and spins you around once more.  Don't miss the ultimate in dramatic sonic extremes which has been saved for last - Yon Assassin Is My Equal truly is a NWW classic.  The aforementioned lounge-music sample is developed a little more around the halfway mark to give a little oasis of calm after noisy chaos, before more creepy voices and ambient whirring takes us to the end.

link

Previously posted at SGTG:
Insect & Individual Silenced (1981)
Homotopy To Marie (1982)
Sylvie & Babs (1985)
Spiral Insana (1986)
Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)
Salt Marie Celeste (2003)
Spitch'cock One (2004)

Nurse With Wound - Insect & Individual Silenced (1981)

Been listening to a ton of Nurse With Wound this past week or two, and there hasn't been any posted here for ages, so here goes - with the one that Steven Stapleton famously hated so much that he burned the master tapes.  Finally relenting in 2007 on hearing a near-flawless vinyl rip, Stapleton decided that the album, although still a failure by his standards, wasn't half as bad as he remembered, and allowed the vinyl rip (by Kevin Spencer of Robot Records) to become this official reissue.

Listening to it now, especially in context with the three earliest NWW albums that preceded it, and Homotopy To Marie that came after, I certainly don't see a dip in quality with Insect - if anything, it's just a blip on the trajectory by which Stapleton's surrealist editing & mixing craft had been steadily increasing from album to album, which would lead to Homotopy being the first full-on masterpiece that he remains justifiably proud of.  The much freer, anarchic sound of Insect lies in the recording circumstances, as recalled in Stapleton's detailed reminisce in the CD sleevenotes - reproduced here, about halfway down the page, headed "1980: A Year Of Change".  TL;DR: Stapleton, and mates Trevor Reidy and Jim 'Foetus' Thirlwell go into a studio for two days to "see what would happen".  Record ensues; Stapleton mortified - until latter-day reappraisal.  So let's listen...

Kicking off with a roar of reverberating feedback, which will reappear sporadically throughout the track's 27 minutes, Alvin's Funeral (The Milk Was Delivered In Black Bottles) is heady, classic early NWW.  Plenty of noise and tape mutilation, voices in different languages, and other barely identifiable clankings and howlings.  Anyone familiar with Part 2 of Bradford Red Light District, Stapleton and William Bennett's experiment in cranking up every reverb setting in the studio to 11, will recognise the source that those roars of feedback have been 'borrowed' from...

The second track, Absent Old Queen Underfoot, was the first to be recorded when the three participants rocked up in the studio to let loose on a reduced drumkit (Reidy), bass amp and jack plugs (Thirlwell) and a crappy guitar (Stapleton).  The result sounds almost like industrial jazz of the most wonderfully inept variety - something to tap your foot to in a jazz club, if you happened to be Jack Nance in Eraserhead.  Lastly, there's the shorter, slightly more recognisably Nurselike Mutilés du Guerre, with more tape-bent squeaking, screaming and the looped voice of Brigitte Fontaine, and the most magnificently surreal ending possible, an arrangement of Ode To Joy for voice and... banjo.  Essential weirdness that deserves full recognition in Stapleton's long, surreal career.

CD reissue cover, 2007

link

Nurse With Wound & others - Angry Eelectric Finger (Spitch'cock One) (2004)

Sampler for a series of collaborative albums, spawned by Steven Stapleton giving chunks of NWW raw material to a select group of acquaintances.  Review, written by me for Head Heritage shortly after the release of this CD, can be found here (published 13 years ago today!).  Needs a bit of editing if I'm honest, being about five times as long as the average SGTG writeup... and despite saying I couldn't wait to hear the rest of the project, I've still to get around to it, for shame.  Anyone heard the other installments? Worth picking up?

link

Nurse With Wound - Homotopy To Marie (1982)

In algebraic topology, homotopy is the continuous deformation of one function into another… or something. I don’t think I’ve even summarised that properly from trying to look up a simplified explanation.  Somehow, that seems an ideal lead-in to discussing the fifth Nurse With Wound album, and second one to be created solely by Steven Stapleton, every Friday evening for a year, cementing his place as a true wizard of tape manipulation.

Even the track titles here are in another league.  I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind starts proceedings with much scraping and groaning, before a startling sample of Balinese Kecak cuts in about a minute before the end.  The title track is next, with those echoing gongs very much an early Stapleton staple, as are the surreal voices used.  A woman intermittently exclaims “Don’t be naïve, darling”, as if chiding the other voice in which a child recounting a hospital stay is presented in fragments.  As the track goes on, ominous creaky springs make you wonder if the child narrator hasn’t perhaps been condemned to a Victorian asylum rather than undergone a brief hospitalisation.

After the adult voice finally says something different (“Philistine!”), a few music-box fragments take us into Astral Dustbin Dirge.  Similar to the opening track, but more varied, this was omitted from the original LP for reasons of space.  Towards the end, you can hear where Stapleton would go with his next album – Astral Dustbin Dirge wasn’t on it either, despite being listed on the cover, presumably in jest at the track’s orphaned status.

Over on the old side 2, The Schmürz (Unsullied by Suckling) starts out with some sort of militaristic marching chant, cut up into incomprehensibility, and proceeds to fill out its 24 minute length with more clanging, shrill electronics, samples of choral music, more voices (including an animated conversation in Spanish), and more.  A wonderfully weird jazzy ending brings the track to a memorable close, before an 80-second epilogue of more groaning and manic cackling brings things full circle.  Beyond-essential sound manipulation.

link

Nurse With Wound - Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)

Some more Nurse With Wound is long overdue here - so enjoy one of Steven Stapleton's all-time masterpieces, recorded in late 1991.  Two massive tracks - one lasting 23 minutes, the other 32.  Stapleton had of course been producing side-long epics since day one, but Cold and Colder Still are two of his all-time best.  Sound artist Colin Potter, who would become a long term collaborator, came on board at this point and played a crucial role in buffing up the NWW sound to this new dark psychedelic sheen.

Cold is a glorious racket of grinding, chugging rhythm, mixing in everything but the kitchen sink (although managing to include the smoke alarm by the sounds of it, at the two and a half minute mark), and taking in twisted xylophone-like sounds, sinister haunted typewriters, and god knows what else.  Once this peters out into a odd-legged clanging coda, we're slammed straight into the never-ending dark ambient nightmare of Colder Still.  Gradually gathering pace in its first half, with a subtle, insistent beat that drops out for more mindbending drone, everything picks up pace with the introduction of another rhythm track.  This little bongo loop would be used several more times in 90s NWW, but in its first appearance here it heralds the voices of David Tibet and Rose McDowall intoning some wonderfully bizarre dream imagery.  After this, we're brought a bit more gently back to earth with a stately ambient finale.

link

Nurse With Wound - Spiral Insana (1986)

How about another NWW post?  This album's probably more suited to early summer, and it's one of the very few of Stapleton's albums that (to my mind at least) actually works better outdoors and in daylight.  With a more expansive and sometimes pastoral sound than what had gone before, it may come as a surprise that Spiral Insana found the artist under considerable pressure from a new label to complete the album quickly.

The strained circumstances may have led to there being less of a mind-boggling diversity of sound sources feeding into Spiral Insana, but this proves to be the album's strength.  Recurring themes to watch out for include a swelling organ chord, and a grinding guitar loop that could've sat comfortably on a Faust album, helping orient the way through a more coherent album experience.  The third track on the CD version of Spiral Insana was left off the original vinyl - it's often this third piece, Nihil, that I've enjoyed best, sounding the most charmingly bucolic.

link

Previously posted at SGTG:
The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Thigh Companion
Salt Marie Celeste

Nurse With Wound - Salt Marie Celeste (2003)

One of the most outstanding dark ambient Nurse With Wound pieces, Salt Marie Celeste is like a supernatural, ghost-ship movie in sound, and deserves full attention in a dark room.  Its roots were in 'Salt', a piece Steven Stapleton had conceived as his contribution to the background of a showing of his (and David Tibet's) visual art, and in that form only consisted of the rising and falling drone.

Fleshed out with the gradual addition and subtraction of eerie rattling and ominous creaking sounds, and a forlorn, distant ship's horn, Salt Marie Celeste becomes a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere.  Perfectly descriptive of an abandoned (or is it?) sinking ship, at its end the piece is reduced back down to just the drone of the lapping waves that we're finally sinking beneath.  A masterfully executed, near-unrivaled highlight in the vast NWW catalogue.

link