NURSE WITH WOUND - CHANCE MEETING ON A DISSECTING TABLE OF A SEWING MACHINE AND UMBRELLA @ 45

 

Marking its 45th anniversary this month is the debut album from Nurse With Wound, Chance Meeting On a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and Umbrella, which was recorded in September of 1979. In addition to introducing the world to one of the UK's most unusual post-punk experimental concoctions, it provided collectors of strange music with one of the most useful laundry lists of artists ever assembled.

Prior to forming Nurse With Wound, Steven Stapleton was an avid record collector with a refined penchant for the strangest and most unusual music he was able to track down. As a graphic artist, commercially employed as a sign painter, he'd developed a passion for surrealism and sought out music that reflected that aesthetic. The founding of Nurse With Wound (NWW) then came about as a bit of rather serendipitous fortune, due to one of Stapleton's sign painting jobs for an independent recording studio. While on the job, Steven got to chatting with one of the engineers, Nick Rogers, who began lamenting his boredom with recording commercials and voice-over work, musing how he would love to be able to work on something more adventurous and creative. That twigged Stapleton, who immediately offered Rogers the opportunity to record his "band", an entity that didn't actually exist at the time. It was a moment of seizing an opportunity, with the practical aspects being left to work themselves out, after the fact. Stapleton immediately contacted two of his close music collector buddies, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, instructing them to get hold of instruments for a recording session, thus establishing NWW's first official lineup.

The trio booked a six hour session for one day in the studio and showed up with their gear and no idea of what they were going to do, as they'd spent no time rehearsing or planning anything. For the recordings, the "group" was Stapleton on percussion, Fothergill on guitar (with built-in ring modulator) and Pathak on organ. Engineer Rogers also contributed what was credited as "commercial guitar". The studio's piano and synthesizer were also used. The session consisted entirely of on-the-spot improvisations that shook out into three different movements that were subsequently edited slightly and given a few minor overdubs before they were able to walk away with a finished mix of their debut album at the end of the session.

The trio then decided to release the recordings via their own newly minted label imprint, United Dairies, utilizing a vinyl pressing plant that normally specialized in classical recordings, to ensure the quality of the pressing was best able to capture the recording's dynamic range. 500 copies were pressed for its first run. The group's name came from a scene in the film Battleship Potemkin, and the album's title is a quote from the surreal poetic novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, by Uruguayan-born French author Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, written under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont. Stapleton designed the cover utilizing images pilfered from pornographic magazines, which resulted in some outlets insisting on the album being concealed in a brown paper bag, though some of the more adventurous outlets, like Virgin and Rough Trade, were happy to let it be seen in all its kinky glory. Here, I've cleverly plastered a NWW logo over the offending portion to thwart Facebook filters!

The original hand-numbered 500 copy pressing was sold within weeks. Among those who bought the album were Tim Gane, later of Stereolab, and William Bennett of Whitehouse, both of whom would later work with Stapleton. Critical response to the album was also surprisingly positive, if not a bit confused. Sounds summed up their response by abandoning their usual star rating system to award the album a full 5 question marks! In later reviews, the album has been lauded as "one of the more glowing examples of late-70s industrial noise" (All Music), and FACT magazine ranked the album at #51 on their list of "The 100 best albums of the 1970s".

One of the most influential aspects of the record's packaging was the inclusion of an A4 printout of the now infamous "Nurse With Wound List", a veritable "who's who" of experimental musical performers from the era prior to the record's release, all of whom were considered influential by the band. Dozens of artists were cited in the list, which has become an invaluable resource for collectors of strange and unusual music from that era. Having been mentioned on the "List" has become something of a guarantee that avid collectors will likely be hunting for your records, and has undoubtedly resulted in numerous reissues of rare releases in the ensuing years since its first publication.

Chance Meeting... has subsequently seen a number of represses and reissues, some of which have expanded its contents, like the 2001 CD special edition that added the fourth track, "Strain, Crack, Break", which consists of a heavily cut-up recording of David Tibet reading the "List". Though certainly a notable example of experimental improvisation, the album is not particularly indicative of what NWW would soon become. The lineup for the band would quickly diverge, leaving Stapleton as the sole proprietor of the venture by the third album. His techniques and approaches would rapidly develop over the course of those early releases as well, with the album, Homotopy to Marie (1982) being the release where the true NWW sound and aesthetic, in all its sophistication and complexity, would first come into its full flower. Since then, NWW has involved innumerable collaborators and a vast range of approaches and styles, with its output continuing to rank as some of the most collectible artifacts of the underground music scene. 

The "List" included with the album is documented here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_with_Wound_list

The album can be streamed and purchased from Bandcamp.
https://nursewithwound1.bandcamp.com/.../chance-meeting...

NURSE WITH WOUND - SHE AND ME FALL TOGETHER IN FREE DEATH @ 20

 

Turning 20 years old today is She and Me Fall Together In Free Death by Nurse With Wound, which was released on May 31st, 2003.  Initially available only as a limited vinyl edition, the album found Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter exploring a somewhat more conventional musical landscape, at least by NWW standards.  The side long title track verged decidedly into psychedelic rock territory, particularly akin to Krautrock pioneers like CAN and NEU!.  A constant, hypnotic drum beat drives the groove while spacey guitar intonations drift atop of the bass heavy rhythm.  Side two consists of a triptych of compositions, kicked off with a cover of the traditional folk song, Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair, which features the first ever lead vocal performance by Steven Stapleton.  The remaining two tracks go into more recognizably surreal NWW style weirdness, first exploring chicken coup insanity on Chicken Concret and finishing off with some robot pornography on Gusset Typing.  The CD edition issued the following year adds two remixed bonus tracks, the first being of the title track in a “Phosphorous Mix”, and the second being a variation of Chicken Concret titled Chicken Korma.

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.

NURSE WITH WOUND - SALT MARIE CELESTE @ 20

 

Marking its 20th anniversary this month is Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste, which was released in February of 2003. An early, minimal mix of the album was issued as “Salt” in 2002, in a split limited edition release with Current 93 called “Music From the Horse Hospital”. That version featured an hour long mix of only the swelling, wave like drone which forms the foundation of the composition. The full version adds various sounds of groaning and creaking wood, creating an audio environment meant to evoke the ambiance of a ghost ship - lost, forgotten and adrift in the void of an endless ocean.

The reference in the title is to the infamous Marie Celeste brigantine ship found adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands on December 4, 1872. The reasons for her fate have never been resolved...

“At the salvage hearings in Gibraltar following her recovery, the court's officers considered various possibilities of foul play, including mutiny by Mary Celeste's crew, piracy by the Dei Gratia crew or others, and conspiracy to carry out insurance or salvage fraud. No convincing evidence supported these theories.”
- Wikipedia

In 2022, to mark the 20th anniversary of its original recording by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, a double CD edition was released containing both variations of the recording.

NURSE WITH WOUND - TO THE QUIET MEN FROM A TINY GIRLS & MERZBILD SCHWET @ 40

Though there is no definitive information on their actual release dates, I'm commemorating the release of both the 2nd and 3rd Nurse With Wound albums today as an arbitrary approximation for their 40th anniversary. Recorded in January and June of 1980, respectively, To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl and Merzbild Schwet represent critical stages in the initial development of this project.

Initiated the year before with the release of Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella, Nurse With Wound was founded by the trio of Heman Pathak, John Fothergill and Steven Stapleton. They would remain in this configuration for the 2nd LP, but creative differences would leave the project in the sole proprietorship of Stapleton by the recording of the 3rd. Going forward, NWW would evolve into an ever shifting conglomerate of collaborations with a huge variety of artists. Though some would become somewhat regular contributors, Stapleton would always remain its central instigator.

Whereas the first LP was essentially little more than a bit of a studio lark for the trio, being recorded with little forethought and little time (I believe it was a one day affair), they started to take things a bit more seriously with the 2nd LP and, by the time the third was manifest, the basic essence of the central concepts were well in place. The references to Dada and Surrealism were firmly fixed and the production values started to reflect a desire to offer some kind of high fidelity while simultaneously sabotaging it with the use of inexplicable distortions and glitches. United Dairies, the self-run label releasing the albums, even relied on a pressing plant specializing in classical recordings for their releases as the technicians there were more adept at dealing with extremes in audio dynamics inherent in the genre as opposed to other plants who were more used to the heavily compressed recordings common within the rock & roll arena. The results were records of uncommon clarity and precision within the scope of the material being presented.

The compositions themselves offered up a more interesting progression than the improvised cacophony of the depute from the previous year. Certainly, there was still a lot of clutter in the sound at times, but there was a much greater expansion in the appreciation of strategic silences. The principals of "cut-ups" were starting to manifest in the use of found voice elements, though the editing sophistication was still lacking and would not manifest into its full flower until the following year with the release of the pivotal Homotopy to Marie LP. However, the course and the evolution are clearly audible on these two albums and the progression is unmistakable.

Personally, I didn't managed to track these down until the early 2000s on CD, once online ordering became practical for me. I'd picked up an LP in 1989, The Sisters Of Pataphysics, which offered extracts from the first three LPs, but the presence of the Chance Meeting components put me off the album due to their rudimentary nature. Once I got a chance to hear these two albums in their entirety, I was much better able to appreciate the evolution which had occurred and the development of Stapleton's ability to surprise and misdirect. Merzbild Schwet, in particular, stands out as one of the few recordings I've ever heard which caused me to think my stereo system was broken. The opening few minutes had me rushing to my equipment, in a panic, thinking it was about to implode. I give kudos for that any time someone manages to pull it off.

Though they are albums which represent a "work in progress", I still find them very listenable, overall, at least as far as Nurse With Wound is considered. There's a certain ambience to them that sinks into the environment and allows you to absorb it all without too many instances of things jarring you out of your comfort zone. Of course, that's assuming your comfort zone is a bed of nails.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - NURSE WITH WOUND, SYLVIE & BABS

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.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - L.A.Y.L.A.H. ANTIRECORDS, THE FIGHT IS ON

Compilation albums can be a bit like buffets in that there's usually a few things you really like, but a lot of stuff you just gotta pass by.  But the advent of the independent label culture in the wake of the punk/industrial/new wave movements of the late 1970s energized the concept of the compilation album as a critical means of exposing new talent and artists who may have otherwise had too much niche appeal to justify their own dedicated releases to start. 

During an era of abundant notable experimental music compilations, one of the most influential for me remains the 1985 release from L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords, The Fight Is On.  L.A.Y.L.A.H. were a Belgian boutique indie label ran by Marc Monin from 1983 until 1989.  The label was responsible for the initial promotion of a number of renowned experimental artists including Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93, The Hafler Trio, Organum, Robert Haigh and and others.  The Fight Is On gave me some of my first exposure to several of those artists, nearly all of which subsequently became collecting obsessions. 

L.A.Y.L.A.H. releases always presented themselves with extremely high production values and refined design aesthetics.  Seeing that imprint on any piece of vinyl or CD was generally a guarantee that you'd be getting your hands on something unusual and distinctive for collectors with the most discerning tastes. 

The Fight Is On, as a collection, has never seen a reissue of significance since its initial release, which is unfortunate as it does offer an invaluable cross section of the prime movers of the post industrial experimental music scene at that time.  The intersection of "noise" music with Neo-classicism and Neo-folk's early tendrils provides an essential foundation for comprehending the roots of where these genres would develop in the ensuing decades.