NURSE WITH WOUND - SOLILOQUY FOR LILITH @35

 

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this month is Nurse With Wound’s triple LP slab of droning ambience, Soliloquy For Lilith, which was released in May of 1988. After nearly a decade of warping minds with a series of surreal and jarring excursions into sonic malfeasance, Steven Stapleton charted an abrupt change of course for this album, into a world of serene solemnity, forcing his fans to reconsider what was possible for the project while creating one of the most enduring and admired titles in it’s vast catalogue.

From its inception, Nurse With Wound had established itself as a true eclectic outlier within the experimental music community, creating a series of idiosyncratic releases which generally involved extensive use of disorienting editing and audio cutup techniques. Soliloquy, however, would rely on a very different approach, with Stapleton and wife, Diana Rogerson, claiming to have used no instruments of any kind in the album’s production. Instead, the sounds originated from a series of effects devices and pedals which were wired together in sequence to form a closed feedback loop, with no original source instrument or microphone to generate the sound. The noises that emanated from this configuration were believed to have resulted from an electrical wiring fault in the studio which caused a “hum” to be picked up in the wiring. This noise was then morphed and amplified by the feedback loop of effects pedals. Changes to the tone and texture of the sound were triggered by Stapleton’s physical proximity to different devices in the chain. Moving & gesturing near them, like one would do with a Theremin, caused oscillations and other modulations. A series of six recordings of this setup were captured, each lasting no less than 17-18 uninterrupted minutes in length.

Nurse With Wound releases are often packaged in limited editions, occasionally with one of a kind cover art for the extremely rarefied items. For this release, Stapleton & Rogerson created a new, though short-lived, independent label imprint, Idle Hole, and assigned the album a catalogue number of Mirror One. Funding for the project was aided by a government Enterprise Allowance Scheme grant. The album was packaged as three LPs enclosed in a glossy black lidded box, embossed with a gold foil radiating disc graphic & title texts. An insert included with the set depicted the Burney Relief (also known as the Queen of the Night), a Mesopotamian terracotta plaque in high relief of the Old-Babylonian period. It depicts a winged, nude, goddess-like figure with bird's talons, flanked by owls, and perched upon two lions. The figure is often associated with the biblical figure of Lilith, a female in Mesopotamian and Judaic mythology, theorized to be the first wife of Adam and supposedly the primordial she-demon. The title of the album, while being archaic and occult in nature, also referred to the couple’s daughter, Lilith, who was born earlier in 1988.

Although a limited edition, the album quickly sold out, even at the exorbitant price necessitated by the elaborate packaging. I recall paying $60 CAN for mine in the local import record shop, a steep price in 1988. In fact, it quickly became Nurse With Wound’s most popular release, with funds generated by its sales contributing to the Stapleton family being able to finance the purchase of farm property at Cooloorta in County Clare, Ireland in 1989, where they maintain a homestead to this day. The album was reissued on CD, first in 1993 in a standard jewel case 2CD set, and then again in 2003, this time in an expanded 3CD edition with packaging emulating the original LP embossed box. The third disc, added to further emulate the original LP configuration, adds two remixes to the set, bringing the total to eight movements. The reissues continued to sell better than nearly any other Nurse With Wound title and the album remains in print. It easily stands as one of my all-time favorite releases from Nurse With Wound, as well as one of its most listenable.