The first times I encountered the entity known as Nurse With Wound were late in 1984 and throughout 1985 as contributors to various "Industrial" compilation albums. Various tracks would pop up on collections such as The Elephant Table, Rising from the Red Sands, The Fight Is On, and numerous others. I found those first exposures pretty baffling. I didn't quite know what to make of this stuff and I didn't actually understand what NWW was. Were they a band? What I heard didn't sound like anyone playing instruments. It seemed like mostly collages of weird sounds and found recordings. I'd be hanging out at various parties, goon'd to the gills, and a NWW piece would come on, out of the blue, and put me in a bad mood. Some of these pieces, like The Dance of Fools, just sounded ugly and unpleasant and made me feel like I'd accidentally been dosed with the "brown acid". It was a "bad trip", man! As such, I tended to dismiss it/them.
It wasn't until an autumn evening in 1986 that I was in just the right place at just the right time with just the right record to open my ears to the genius of Steven Stapleton. I was hanging out with some friends one evening, taking a magic carpet ride on some decent blotter, and going through a stack of LPs my friend had brought over. I came across this album that looked like some thrift store vintage oddity with these torpedo tit'd mid-century maidens on the cover called "Sylvie and Babs". I thought my friend was being funny bringing this record over, slipping it in the stack for a laugh. Then he pointed out the spine of the cover and I saw the name Nurse With Wound on it. Opening up the gate-fold, the inside of the cover was plastered with this collage of bizarre images of drag queens and debauchery and revealed the subversive soul hiding behind the seemingly innocuous outer cover.
Once we'd hit the appropriate altitude on our crazy carpet, we put on Sylvie & Babs and I spent the next 40 minutes in fits of laughter so intense, I was sure I was going to burst a blood vessel. Over the course of the album's two, side long constructs, I was taken on a sonic adventure through landscapes both familiar and alien, ridiculous and sublime. In that state, what Stapleton and cohorts were doing suddenly became clear to me. His sense of timing, of dynamics, of when to go soft and when to beat the fuck out of your head, was all spot-on. Discovering later on that he'd spent years working with dozens of collaborators on this project made perfect sense when considering the complexity of the layering and sequencing involved in it. It was a magnum opus of cut-up collage magnificence from the very first, dreamy sounds to the last.
After this, I became a dedicated aficionado of all things NWW and collected anything I could get my hands on. It taught me to think of composition as a process of sculpting and not just how many times you repeat a sequence or what order to put a verse and chorus. It showed me how sound design was a narrative process, where one can create a cinematic story arc with the way sounds were placed and edited and combined. Rigid mathematical considerations like numbers of bars or beats or tempo were not the only considerations in this process. There were intuitive, instinctual, non-linear factors which could be brought to bare on the compositional process as well.
