#Nurse With Wound #Steven Stapleton #experimental #industrial
#avant-garde #noise #dark ambient #drone #sound collage #plunderphonics
#animated music video #stop-motion
A challenging, amorphous
entity that has revolved around Steve Stapleton for almost forty years,
Nurse With Wound has operated at the vanguard of industrial, drone and
ambient music with fearless clarity. Steve Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound
project is regularly positioned in the same universe as Current 93 and
Coil on the basis of shared roots, ongoing social connections and a
vague genre definition. What really unifies NWW with the other two,
however, is the sheer uniqueness of the musical vision at play - each
band has defined a sound world that echoes known genres, while belonging
to any and all they might wish. In the case of Stapleton, his work has
rarely featured a front-man or a conventional vocal presence, meaning
the focus has always been on his abilities to reinvent and reimagine
sounds in new contexts and new situations via his skill as a sound
collagist. His focus on the moods and emotions evoked by what he creates
has ensured a truly expansive set of alternative visions within his
long discography. From: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/an-introduction-to-nurse-with-wound-in-10-records/
As
a testament to the random disorder and beauty of life, London’s Nurse
With Wound (Steven Stapleton) functioned outside the normal musical
channels for a decade, experimenting with tape collages of disjointed
phrases, improvised music, electronics and found sounds on a series of
intriguing, provocative, humorous and frequently entertaining
self-released records. Between 1978 and 1988, Stapleton collaborated
with such likeminded sonic adventurers as David Tibet of Current 93 and
Tony Wakeford of Sol Invictus to produce a prodigious body of work that
embraces surrealism in both content and graphics.
NWW’s debut,
Chance Meeting of a Sweing Machine and an Umbrella on a Dessecting
Table, welds introverted, spacey guitar to converging hemispheres of
intergalactic blips. Then, like much of the band’s music, it veers into
sketchy doodles: between intermittent lulls of humming and buzzing,
there are bursts of frenzied screeching, torture chamber screams, piano
scales, women speaking French, etc.
To the Quiet Men From a Tiny
Girl resembles a nest of vibrating insects, with clinking chains,
someone practicing saxophone, an operatic soprano and other voices.
“Ostranenie” suggests a house of a hundred rooms — with a different
noise in each.
Merzbild Schwet is as challenging as a Buñuel
film, with repeated lines (like “We have fallen silent - lost the power
of speech - our heads are empty”) as women laugh and sing. Other
ingredients: clanking, ripping velcro, angry voices and something like a
sick elephant honking.
Those first three albums were later
reissued in a CD boxed set (Psilotripitaka), which also includes Ladies
Home Tickler, another bizarre cut-up collage: snippets of sappy tunes,
electrical noises and taunting laughter. Present the Sisters of
Pataphysics compiles passages from the first three LPs.
The avant
drippings on Sylvie and Babs — the most guest-laden NWW effort, with
dozens of contributors as opposed to the usual one or two — include more
laughter and repetition of the word “pardon.” The two Automating albums
collect material from the many compilations to which Nurse With Wound
has contributed. Slices of show tunes, repetitive background beats and
advice like “Never eat anything bigger than your head” are sprinkled
throughout. Volume II addresses the hierarchy of biological existence;
one segment could be the soundtrack for a science fiction feature about
giant rampaging tarantulas.
A pair of 12-inch EPs paired as an
album, Gyllensköld bristles the coarsest of hairs with scratching and
horror dungeon screams while Brained adds the demonic voice of Clint
Ruin yet contains a movement that could accompany an underwater Cousteau
documentary.
A Sucked Orange offers 20 experimental vignettes,
many of which justify their titles: the scraping murmur of “Flea Bite,”
the repetitive clank of utensils beneath a spoken loop of “It ain’t
necessarily so” on “It Just Ain’t So,” the catchy ditty plinked out on
“This Piano Can’t Think.”
Soliloquy for Lilith is Stapleton’s
surprising chef d’oeuvre, a three-album box of contemplative,
atmospheric experiments employing treatments of a stringed instrument of
his own invention.
Over time, however, the group’s usual
organized chaos gained a certain predictability. At the end of 1988,
Stapleton moved to a farm in Ireland.
More accessible than much
of Stapleton’s ’80s work, Rock ‘n Roll Station is rhythmic almost to the
point of being dancefloor-friendly. The combination of rhythms, noise
and ambience is in line with work done in the mid-to-late-’90s by
artists on the Warp label. The title track begins with a clipped rhythm
aided by random vocal samples; “The Self Sufficient Sexual Shoe” repeats
the idea with male vocals replaced by female whispers. “Two Golden
Microphones” is a multifaceted 17-minute sonic beast that throws
together fragments of pop songs, surf instrumentals and tribal rhythms.
“A Silhouette and Thumbtack (A Dance in Hyperspace)” slides from spooky
ambience to a beat interrupted by random samples/noise. “R+B Through
Collis Browne” works together female screams and guitar samples. The
disc ends with three minutes of “Finsbury Park, May 8th, 1.35 pm (I’ll
See You In Another World),” ambient-drone accented by a thumping beat.
From: https://trouserpress.com/reviews/nurse-with-wound/
Steven Stapleton
