How do you like this amazing bargain? Two jam-packed discs of Gary Numan live recordings for only $10.98, and it's by no means at the expense of quality! All three volumes of his Living Ornaments trilogy are fantastic documents not only of Numan in his prime as a fine composer and dynamic showman, but also of analog synthesizers being performed in the rock arena. They (and the bandmembers playing them) were seriously put through a workout during these concerts. Keep in mind that analog synth sounds aren't preset, and those instruments also had a habit of drifting out of tune. So that means if the synth player required a different sound he would need to specifically dial it in each time (adjusting all the necessary parameters... often quite a complex process). Certainly makes these performances all the more awesome and a blast to hear a quarter of a decade later! Not to mention Numan's unmistakable, expressive vocals and masterly compositions. This is the real deal! It's definitely none of that lame preset arpeggiated excuse for synth music that's been plaguing our ears of late. It's unfortunate that Numan gets lumped in with the vacuous '80s new wavers 'cause music has so much more depth, both compositionally and emotionally. Seriously, if "Cars" hadn't been such a big hit (and thus thereafter unfairly condemning Numan to 'one-hit-wonder' status), his body of work would be viewed in a much different light (probably more critically lauded, and albeit probably much less widely popularized). An added bonus are all of the live photos of the spectacular stage and lighting set-up. He truly reciprocated all the love his fans bestowed upon him. Stunning! Completists will probably want all three volumes (there's some repeating of songs throughout), but if you wanna start with one then Living Ornaments '79 is the one to get first.
How do you like this amazing bargain? Two jam-packed discs of Gary Numan live recordings for only $10.98, and it's by no means at the expense of quality! All three volumes of his Living Ornaments trilogy are fantastic documents not only of Numan in his prime as a fine composer and dynamic showman, but also of analog synthesizers being performed in the rock arena. They (and the bandmembers playing them) were seriously put through a workout during these concerts. Keep in mind that analog synth sounds aren't preset, and those instruments also had a habit of drifting out of tune. So that means if the synth player required a different sound he would need to specifically dial it in each time (adjusting all the necessary parameters... often quite a complex process). Certainly makes these performances all the more awesome and a blast to hear a quarter of a decade later! Not to mention Numan's unmistakable, expressive vocals and masterly compositions. This is the real deal! It's definitely none of that lame preset arpeggiated excuse for synth music that's been plaguing our ears of late. It's unfortunate that Numan gets lumped in with the vacuous '80s new wavers 'cause music has so much more depth, both compositionally and emotionally. Seriously, if "Cars" hadn't been such a big hit (and thus thereafter unfairly condemning Numan to 'one-hit-wonder' status), his body of work would be viewed in a much different light (probably more critically lauded, and albeit probably much less widely popularized). An added bonus are all of the live photos of the spectacular stage and lighting set-up. He truly reciprocated all the love his fans bestowed upon him. Stunning! Completists will probably want all three volumes (there's some repeating of songs throughout), but if you wanna start with one then Living Ornaments '79 is the one to get first.
Sigh. Here it is, the new full length from Gary Numan. Despite his recent escapades with the likes of Fear Factory (who covered his hit single "Cars") and because of his more recent involvement with Stephin Merritt's Sixths project, I had such high hopes for this record, but those hopes were quickly dashed. From the bad demo-like package design (ugly font, ugly photos) to the disappointing music. It seems this album should have been released back in the mid-80s. In fact, track 7 is a deadringer for Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence". There are brief moments when the Numan of old shines through, but those moments are so few and far between. Sadly most of the time, the vocals are overly effected and affected. The music, paint by numbers neo-industrial (think "Antichrist Superstar" Marilyn Manson). By the time I got to the second to last song my heart had sunk so low, but it was about to sink even lower 'cause that song "Little In Vitro" sounds so creepily like that overplayed Chris Isaak "I Don't Want to Fall in Love" song... no no no. Too much to bear.
It's always a joy to rediscover an album from your youth that's stood the test of time, offering not only a comfy nostalgic feel but also remaining wonderfully listenable decades later. This one's a keeper (particularly if you ask Cup!), and we don't even really need the bonus disc of b-sides and other extras included in this expanded 2008 tour edition. The alternate renditions of "Down In The Park" and "Are 'Friends' Electric?"will surely geek the super duper fans though!
On a passing glance at the synthesized surface of Gary Numan's music it'd be easy to dismissed it along with the hordes of '80s new wave fluff and cheese. Heck, he was the king of British new wave back then! However if you move past your feelings good or bad for his ultra hit single "Cars", you'll be rewarded with near classical compositional elegance, heartbreakingly beautiful melodic interludes, not to mention Numan's remarkably emotive voice expressing his dystopic Philip K. Dick, W.S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard inspired lyrics. All these things stand in stark contrast to the emotionless android chill commonly associated with the genre, and ultimately that's the point that's made crystal clear when hearing Replicas nearly three decades after its original release. While it certainly appeals to the new waver in all of us, it delivers so much more!
There are those of us who cannot imagine our lives without the alienated plaints of Gary Numan. Here, finally, are his hits. 18 tracks. Two versions of "Cars". "Stormtrooper in Drag"! All digitally remastered. Life is now, at last, worth living.
We loved NN's Urmerica record, reviewed here a long while back, a strange concoction of thick layered drone music, noise flecked field recordings and blissed out ur-drone shimmer, a sound we likened to Jazzfinger, Birchville and other sonically likeminded longform noisescapers, and this latest offers up more of the same, which makes sense when you realize that this is not in fact a new recording, but instead is an archival release, that had sat on the shelf for years, originally intended for release way back in 2007-2008. Not sure if this band is still active, but the fact that these guys were making noise like this and somehow managed to remain mostly under the radar boggles the mind. This shit is massive, dense, heavy, brutal, blown out, the group deftly weaving guitarnoise and harmonium drones into heaving swells of crumbling crush, blowing speakers with a fearsome intensity, before shifting ever so subtly, and those same sounds are transformed into something much more blissed out and hypnotic. There's a definitely soundtrack element, but it's the sort of music you wish some director actually had the balls to use in a film, emotional and hauntingly bleak, dense and fearsomely atmospheric, evoking all manner of images, most sinister and otherworldly, but sometimes it's easy to let your mind drift, eyes closed, headphones strapped on, and get lost in some grim, grey city, devoid of life, or some lost highway, that seems to trail off into the horizon, disappearing into the blackness.
Way recommended for folks into grim black ambience, psychedelic noise, and post industrial soundscapery, which as we often say, is most likely a whole lot of you.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Don't know too much about these guys (or this guy?), Number None, but we've had these sitting in the store for a while, and every time we throw this on, we're reminded how intense and powerful ad awesome this disc is! And every time we thing "we have to get this listed. People are gonna love this, WE love this." Yet somehow, for the last year plus, it's managed to slip through the tracks and go unreviewed, until now!
Unfortunately, these guys and this record are mighty tough to describe. The remind us a bit of Jazzfinger, in that they have no real distinct m.o., instead, they flit from sound to sound, exploring drones, musique concrete, dark ambience, field recordings, often two or more of those at once, but the thing is, whatever sound they've chosen, they OWN it, when you're listening to it, you get totally lost, and forget that moments ago you were listening to them do something else, as far as you, your ears, and your brain know, that glorious sound your hearing right now, extends in both directions, back forever until the birth of the universe, forward to the end of time.
The opening track is the perfect example, a serious and dense drone, layered and complex, notes and tones shifting and overlapping and interweaving, but at the core a super powerful, near static Niblockian drone, so immediately entrancing, 30 seconds in and we were transfixed, and began writing this review assuming that the rest of the record must be just more of the same, and while it's not, and it's a bit frustrating that it's not, as we detailed above, once you're into the next track, the cycle starts all over again.
So in a nutshell, the rest of the record drifts from murky staticky blur, to dense chaotic field recording flecked soundscapes, to soft muted stretches of reverb drenched clatter, warm whispery low end shimmer, sprawling high end metallic buzz smeared into glimmering streaks, super abstract far out free noise freakouts, fuzzy radio interference wrapped around reverberating metal, looped FX drenched video game weirdness and warbly underwater dreaminess. It sounds like utter chaos, and it is sort of, but these guys are so deft with their noise making, that once you push play and sink slowly into the first track, you're done for.
When we made the newest record by An Albatross record of the week a while back, we were pretty sure there could be no band faster and more convoluted and more prog and more fucked up, but I think maybe we were wrong. The curiously named The Number Twelve Looks Like You, take the furious grind prog of An Albatross, ditch the keyboards, and focus on being faster and more complicated and more totally baffling. And succeed, BIG TIME.
Every track here is a mind blowing tangle of complex convoluted leads, super mathy, ultra complicated arrangements, some of the most impossibly dexterous drumming EVER, as well as a cacophony of shrieking vocals, downtuned chugs, blown out crumbling production, and strange almost mosh like breakdowns. Huge blasts of hypergrind are butted right up against almost catchy melodic riffing, before the two somehow collide and join forces and become some ultra impossible melodic hypergrind. Or something. We're tempted to declare this the grind record of the year, but most grindheads would be baffled. Same with metalheads, there's so much space, and weird pop, and so many what-the-fuck moments, that it's impossible to call this a metal record either. But we can safely say it's one seriously fucked up, weird and wonderful, heavy and confusional, convoluted metallic psych prog freaked out grind. Seriously heavy weird shit that just might be your favorite record of the year, if you're into seriously heavy weird shit that is.
And as if to prove our point, and maybe draw attention to their numerical monicker, the last 4 tracks are some sort of baffling Number Twelve suite. Track nine is called "Die" and is 12 seconds of silence. Track ten is also called "Die" and is also 12 seconds of silence. Track eleven, also called "Die", all silence. Track TWELVE is 12 minutes and 12 seconds long, all silence, EXCEPT for the last 12 seconds, which consist of a 12 second long drum and kazoo jam. Fuck. Yeah.
Numbers, all by themselves, have a firm handle on taking the tools of punk rock and using them as instruments of total dancefloor destruction, making them prime candidates for re-interprations of their songs that highlight, rather than obliterate, their inherent status as dance tunes. Some of the tracks on this new remix album do just that, some don't, and as is to be expected from a remix album I guess, some of these tracks work a whole lot better than others, although overall, "Death" is really pretty solid. Most of the mixes here are in the hands of the good-humored glitchmeisters of the Tigerbeat 6 roster, many of whose aims seem to be more idiosyncratic than the simple forging of club-friendly tunage from the Numbers raw material. The best tracks, like Dymaxion's mix of "What Is The Product?" and Caro's take on "Intercom," fracture and extrapolate cold neo-disco from the already thumpin' Numbers beat. Gold Chains inserts himself, friendly and joshing like, into the musical dialogue on his take on "Prison Life" through the additional vocals; the party jams are duly delivered by Kid 606; controversial faux-teutonic trio Zeigenbock Kopf turn "I Like Having These Things" into, uh, a Zeigenbock Kopf song. It's a tribute to all the mixers that it's not immediately noticable that a couple songs are tackled more than once (or twice). Other remixers include Electronicat, Stars As Eyes, Dwayne Sodhaberk, Original Hamster, Kit Clayton, GD Luxxe, Dat Politics and Uprock.
MPEG Download: KID 606 "We Like Having These Things (Williamsburg Rmx)" [/audio/numberskid606rmx.mp3]
MPEG Stream: KID 606 "We Like Having These Things (Williamsburg Rmx)" [/audio/numberskid606rmx.m3u]
Here's a half-live, half studio half dozen from Numbers. The lo-fi live three were recorded in Oakland at a big ol' warehouse 'demolition' party. A messy, raucous EP that's sure to please fans, we'd imagine.
Here's the new one from the Numbers, those neo-New Wavers who are a popular part of the much-hyped San Francisco scene. Robotic dancefloor punk from ex-members of Xerobot, all quirky and jerky, yelpy and bloopy. If you're already into 'em this won't disappoint I'm sure. However, I have to say that a few nights back I happened into a bar where a Judas Priest tribute band was playing. I think they were named Sad Wings of Destiny, from up north someplace, though they looked liked they'd just stumbled drunk out of a Castro bar. And even though they weren't getting every song 100 percent right, they totally rocked. It was very punk and fucked up, spirited and fun and very very campy. The Numbers of course are going for a quite different sort of '70s / '80s retro vibe. But the point is Sad Wings of Destiny (or was it Screaming For Vengeance?) would have blown them off the stage. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that while the Numbers record is not necessarily bad, I liked a messed-up Priest tribute band better way better. They had the songs, they had the attitude, and never mind what's trendy. PRIEST!!
Remember that band Xerobot that were around during the Midwest No Wave craze of the mid nineties? Numbers is ex-members of Xerobot, and everybody is gaga for No Wave in SF right now. Catchy punk rawk, chaotic choppy guitar, screamy/shouty boy/girl vox though distorted makeshift microphones -- it's all good, but the amateurish homemade synth bleeps and token Moog distract from the totally fierce guitarwork. Influences definitely include Gang of Four and Wire. Ten songs, nineteen and a half minutes. Tigerbeat6. Down with the scene.
Long gone are the days of the bratty and sassy Numbers, when the band first hit the scene a few years back. These days Numbers have refined their love of electronic tinged rock, taking cues from sonic pioneers like '70s Brian Eno and early Gary Numan as well as some hints of Krautrock.
As always they have their Moogs and other rad instruments on full throttle (check out their awesome Octave Cat and the always handy shruti box, both of which help create lots of the drones that run through many of the songs on Now You Are This). With vocalist Indra singing lead on a majority of the tracks and irresistible momentum of that most of these songs, we could definitely see Numbers teaming up with kindred spirits Electrelane sometime in the future for a meeting of the musical minds that would make a lot of sense, and most likely sound fantastic.
Wow...This is their best yet! Their first for Kill Rock Stars (after three releases on Tigerbeat 6) and the shift in labels also marks a major shift in sound for this SF trio. While Numbers became known for their diy approach to electro-pop, "we're animals" finds them ready to move on and into different directions. The sound is much fuller and you get the feeling that lots of thought was put into making a full album as opposed to just throwing together a bunch of songs. In lots of ways this is sort of like their Milk Man (the Deerhoof album, that is). Guitars and keyboards which take their cue from early Eno rock albums with moments of washed out sounds that shimmer and sizzle. No more traces of gimmickry. What hasn't changed for Numbers is that their presence and energy is still undeniable. So nice to see when a band has the courage to make a change that might alienate their past fan base but in the process come out on the other end with a record so much better then if they had just continued to go through the expected motions.
If this split 7" had come out a few years ago, it would've probably seemed like a bit of an odd pairing, but these days SF's (formerly much more no-wave influenced) Numbers and Detroit's (formerly very singularly electro-botic) Adult. are soundin' pretty chummy. Where they've found their common ground is in the raw, retro punky pit. Both songs in this split 7" equation feature snarky female vocals and underlying herky-jerk rhythms. Adult. percolates a dark, itchy "Monologue" and Numbers proclaim at a slower tempo "Me Me" punctuated by choppy guitars. Sure to please fans of both bands.
Four songs by SF faves Numbers are paired with five songs from sadly defunct Portlanders Emergency, including a cover by late 70's NYC post-punk group Come On.
Numbers approach everyday technology (photography, TV,) from a distance to produce angular pop that has the power to drive people to dance themselves into sweaty heaps. Two of these songs also appear on their debut full length cd "Numbers Life" on Tigerbeat 6. The Emergency side features bratty/erudite vocals (courtesy Ethan Swan-Scahill, who runs Archigramophone along with drummer Paul Dickow), high pitched guitar anti-melody lines and some damaged punk disco beats. Obnoxious and good, though not as excellent as their lp "The Less I Know" (also on Archigramaphone).
Latest lp from local shoegazing psych duo of guitarist/vocalist Mason Jones (ex-Subarachnoid Space) and drummer Mike Shoun (Thee Oh Sees), both of whom augment Numinous Eye's sound with copious synths and effects. Amped up and/or blissed out, it's hypnotic stuff, some songs riding waves of distorted guitar and roiling drums, others more laid back and mellow, with gentle singing, these more song-y songs still featuring echoing, extended spacey guitar passages over steady, tasteful drum beats (Shoun in Caesura '90s era mode, his old post-rock band), with Mason's gentle, sensitive vocals drifting over top, hinting at Galaxie 500 - though some comparisons soundwise could also be made to the psychedelic stylings of fellow San Franciscans Wooden Shijps, as well as to some of Mason's pals in the Tokyo psych scene (previous Numinous Eye releases have featured contributions from members of Acid Mothers Temple and Up-Tight among others). Recommended - as is this list's other ex-Subarachnoid Space related release, by Eight Bells!
Vinyl-only, comes with digital download code though. And boy is it a thick slab of 180-gram vinyl.
Our pal Mason Jones (formerly of San Francisco space rockers Subarachnoid Space) is known for his Japanese connections as well as for his talent for heavy-duty, effects-laden experimental electric guitar improv. So we're not surprised to find him on this cd live in Japan, teamed up in three separate sessions with three different drummers: Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins, Shirahata of Up-Tight, and Komatsu of... we're not sure, Mason help us out, is it Bloodthirsty Butchers?
Anyway, in all cases, it's darkly psychedelic, freely unfolding guitar/drums jamming, sometimes moody and droned-out, sometimes building up into a howling sonic miasma... when dueting with Yoshida (the only person on here who also uses his voice as an instrument) there's an expected element of progressive spazz.
As with all aRCHIVE releases, painfully limited and in fact already sold out at the label.
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More metalcore. This time it's a weird mix of shrieking hardcore and old school Suicidal Tendencies style funkiness. Weird but cool.
Finally! Here it is, Andee's all time favorite Nurse With Wound record EVER, finally repressed after so many years of being out of print, and now coupled with another amazing (and tangentially related) album, Scrag! Both of these albums date back to the late '80s, with A Sucked Orange originally released on vinyl in 1989 (and later released on cd, although that version suffered from the dreaded bit-rot), and Scrag as a cassette in 1987 (later anthologized on the NWW boxset for Vinyl-On-Demand). There are three tracks which overlap the two album including both opening tracks - "Pleasant Banjo With Irritating Squeak" - which is pretty much exactly what it says it is, although that banjo does sound a lot like a ukulele playing a simple melody butting up against an irritatingly honking toy. It's all very much of the Sylvie-N-Babs ethos of jokester comedy for Nurse With Wound; and like most all of the tracks on A Sucked Orange, it lasts for just about a minute. Stapleton's wife and oft-collaborator Diana Rogerson then belts out shrill vocals wrapped in demonic pitch-shifting and wild-eyed production tricks on the next couple of tracks for A Sucked Orange sandwiching a shimmeringly beautiful ambient interlude, which is easily the most traditionally beautiful thing NWW has ever produced, one we wished existed elsewhere in album length form. The longest track is "I'm A Frayed Knot" with bowed atonal stings undulating over delay-rippled percussion, which are an obvious precursor to his fascination with Perez Prado and mambo rhythms. Stapleton delves into Reichian head-fuckery with the tape-delay / phase-shifting sample kaleidoscope of the two "Rockette Morton" tracks, before eventually making his way to the vaudevillian piano ditty "This Piano Can't Think" a return to that warped, skewed NWW musical humor, but then slipping back again into a gorgeous drone piece in "Crack Up" that's painfully short at one minute and fifty-one seconds, that stretched out to album length would have fans of the Caretaker and Tim Hecker and William Basinski wetting themselves (much like that beautiful interlude earlier on). An intentionally schizophrenic record of disparate cut-ups that somehow displays a strangely compelling and compellingly strange logic through all of the cyclical patterns of form and shape, undercut by detours and dead-ends. And really what should be a frustrating hodge podge mish mash reveals itself as something so much more, like staring at a series of colored dots, only to step back and have the whole beautiful image revealed.
As mentioned above, Scrag opens the same way as A Sucked Orange, before ushering in the pounding rhythm and scabrous metallic feebback of "Wisecrack" with Diana Rogerson belting out another skewered, tortured rant. It's actually one that she reprises on one of her Chrystal Belle Scrodd albums. Angular musique concrete collaged from blunt serialist phrases, jagged rhythms, non-sensical nursery rhymes, and discordant church organs comprise much of the rest of Scrag, making it a worthy companion to the demented, haunting, and down-right fucked-up and bafflingly beautiful A Sucked Orange. Get it now!
There have been a couple of different versions of Alice The Goon which have been floating: two singled-sided 12"s (one with an etching, one without) and a cdep that had an extra track with recordings dating to the mid-'90s.
The Jnana version contains all three tracks, clocking in at around 30 minutes, running the gamut of where NWW has been and where they continue to go in their quizzical, dark, maddening, and comedic collages. The first track "(I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares" is suitably titled, with a jaunty mambo groove of horns and congo drums setting the rhythm throughout the piece, recalling any number of Perez Prado inspired tracks from NWW. On top of this infectious rhythm, NWW splutters with a hot-wired guitar solo that harkens back to the Chance Meeting On An Operating Table delirium through spiky guitar noise. "Prelude To Alice The Goon" finds creaky noises, muted trumpets blaring in the distant, a loping bassline and a PVC pipe percussion coming together in a mutant prog-ish mantra with Diana Rogerson offering occasional vocals. The untitled coda to the album could very well be an extract from the Tibet / Stapleton masterpiece The Sadness Of Things, with spectral vocals cast in heavy, yet glistening robes of reverberation.
Steven Stapleton's latest in the continuing absurdities of Nurse With Wound is almost a throwback to the A Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella with incomprehensibly ridiculous guitar solos over those cheap drum machines that Stapleton has been so fond of on the last few records. In what may be the aural explanation for the title, Stapleton assembled a three piece 70's acid/psych rock band to crank out one piece of hiccuping grooves in between which David Tibet rants as quickly as possible. I can say it's not about butterflies, delicate flowers, and other questionable themes Tibet has embraced on the latest C93 records.
Although there is no track listing or general information on this record, "Automating Volume 1" is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs
The remainder of "Automating Vol. 1" revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release "An Afflicted Man's Musica Box" is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". While both the remaining two tracks, "Ciconia" (from the 1982 Slektion comp "Masse Menche") and "Automating (Again)" (from the 1984 Frux comp "Born Out of Dreams" -- exclusive to the cd re-issue) are themselves influenced greatly by Ashley's "Automatic Writin." A coincidence in the title? I think not! The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with "Homotopy For Marie" and "150 Murderous Passions" as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Automating Volume 1 is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs alongside whimsical farts and blurts of archetypal NWW sounds (as heard on "Alas The Madonna Does Not Function" and "A Missing Sense"). The second track, "Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal" (from the 1986 Laylah compilation "The Fight Is On"), is a Fluxus-esque composition of creaky noise making, with spurts of groans, more fart sounds, party favors, zithers and percussion objects (a lot of the material found on "Homotopy To Marie" can be found here). The third track, "Nana Or A Thing of Uncommon Nonsense", is another silly track (featured on the 1983 X-tract compilation Elephant Table Album), starting out with a tasteless racial joke and then sputtering through a random collage of bongos and football chants (plus, a lot of the polka loops on the Sylvie & Babs lp are used on this.) The album then turns to Stapleton's dark side with his very creepy submission to the Come Organisation album Fur Ilse Koch (1982) on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically irritating high frequency drone. What may in fact be more disturbing than this track is to hear my co-worker Byram muttering the little girl's words as syntatical anomalies in his already idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The remainder of Automating Vol. 1 revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release An Afflicted Man's Musica Box is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with Homotopy For Marie and 150 Murderous Passions as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
In 1986, Steven Stapleton released Automating Vol. 1, filled with some choice selections he had produced for various compilations during his previous eight years of existence as Nurse With Wound. Given just how much amazing material Stapleton produced in the prolific NWW catalog, it's not surprising that his tracks for compilations were pretty damn good even as some of these pieces were drastic remixes and edits of material already on other albums, or they were tracks that didn't quite 'fit' onto one of his already eccentric takes of industrial-psychedelic-concrete constructions by way of classic Surrealism.
So, jump to 2010, and Stapleton has now released Automating Vol. 3 (yes, there was a Volume 2), with equally astounding results again demonstrating his studio magic.
The compilation moves mostly in chronological order, starting with a track from 1984 and traversing almost to the present with a 2008 piece. The earliest number came from a Japanese compilation called Sound Cosmodel, spliced from metallic slashes and the spoken word of a breathy French woman, providing a typically unsettled Nurse collage. The comedy side of NWW comes by way of "Antacid Cocamotive 93" with a funhouse cover of the early '60s hit "Do The Locomotion" that nearly spins off the rails with Diana Rogerson offering her zombified vocals to accompany the warbling silliness of the tune. Another Rogerson duet appears by way of the track "Beetle Crawls Across My Back" recontextualizing the material that she and Stapleton used on one of the Chrystal Belle Scrodd records. Very creepy, dark atmospheres, with almost ritualist percussion buried way down deep upon which Rogerson snarls her nightmarish tale, you guessed it, about insects crawling on her back."Ubu Noir" is a 2006 redux of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - the Appalachian standard that grew notorious via Patty Waters' version in the 60s. Here, Stapleton's cybernetic vocals rasp above blackened loops and leviathan plods. But perhaps the most atypical track is the remix that Stapleton did for the death metal band Cadaverous Condition. Given the uncanny success Stapleton had with the SUNNO))) remix a few years back, this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, as he stretches out the thunderous rhythms, adds haunted chorale loops, and smears the chugging riffs into chunks of mutant noise. Yeah, it's a diverse mix of material; but what Nurse With Wound album isn't? And yeah, it's definitely recommended!
In all honesty, I have to admit being disappointed by the second "Automating" collection of rarieties, out-takes, and compilation tracks from Nurse With Wound. Unlike the first collection which wonderfully expounded upon the Stapleton dichotomy between sublime terror and incredulous silliness, this album lacks any purposeful direction other than collecting rare tracks. The first two tracks -- "The Strange Play Of The Mouth" and "Old Man River / Dance Of Fools" -- are alternate mixes from the universally loved "Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion" of plunderized easy listening records. "Lonely Poisonous Mushroom" follows with dense amounts of cathedral reverb filtering through sporadic samples of church organs, choral notes, and demonic noises, sounding much like an out-take from Current 93's "Dawn." A track (ambiguously titled "Wolfi" as opposed to the original title "Lea Tantaaria") from Graeme Revell's project "Necropolis, Amphibians And Reptiles" of re-interpretations from the early 20th Century outsider artist Adolf Wolfi - just indeterminant plinks, plonks, etc. The uncredited collaboration with Organum "Human Human Human" really sounds nothing like Organum with its sampled dialogue from a crack-pot cult that encourages its followers to cook their own pets.
Most of these tracks date from the late '80s, when Stapleton had really kicked his production into high gear. These tracks collectively appear as the jettisoned debris from his proper albums.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
True to the Surrealist spirit of chance operations yielding uncannily sublime results, Nurse With Wound offers an unintentional remix of the first NWW record in the form of "Chance Meeting Of A Defective Tape Machine And A Migrane." When Matt Waldron -- the mastermind of the incredible, if underappreciated outfit Irr.App.(Ext). and the man responsible for one of the best art shows here at Aquarius -- attempted to make a tape to tape copy of Nurse With Wound's "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella," he didn't expect the machines to do their own remix. The music on this disc was performed by two slightly defective, disobedient tape machines.
Originally released in 1979, "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella," erupts with random plucks, plinks, scrapes, and blurts with varying densities of reverb to create a surprisingly rich space for these improvisations. Making up for their lack of real musical training with years of collecting obscure music, Stapleton and company sat aloof amongst their mess, conjuring their own means of communication to some otherworldly plane. Obviously, Stapleton had enough sense to recognize that the power of studio editing, and didn't release this as a direct-to-tape improvisation. "A Chance Meeting..." could be between Faust, Pierre Henry, AMM, and Sun Ra, but Stapleton's own unique view of how such a meeting would sound and his own application of Surrealist thought kept this album from being merely a meeting of minds.
With Waldron's unconsious remix, the spindly guitar freak outs collapse in a morass of asynchronous tape whirrings and fluctuations, progessively degrading the sound into backwards masked shadows of the former sound. The gradual nature of this collapse in sound gives the impression of intentionality, although Waldon firmly admits that there was nothing of the sort involved with this remix.
While the idea of a Nurse With Wound remix should be reprehensible, Waldron's encounter proves to be the only credible way for Stapleton to be remixed. And thankfully, the end results are downright stunning. Highly recommended!!!
BACK IN PRINT!!! Nice digipak w/ original artwork.
Infamously receiving a rating of "?????" instead of the normal star system employed by Sounds Magazine in 1979, Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella was the first release, from what would eventually be a massive catalogue of sonic absurdity, from the mighty Nurse With Wound. Steven Stapleton began this album and the Nurse With Wound project during the serendipitous moment when engineer Nicky Rogers asked Stapleton, if he ever felt like making some noise on the weekend to come on over to the studio. He called up his friends John Fothergill and Heman Pathak with the frantic proposition: "I've got some studio time, go buy an instrument and let's see what happens!" The three brought over a cheap organ, an accordion, a guitar with a treble booster, a ring modulator (which Stapleton was somewhat saddened by), and as many "little noise making items" that Stapleton could carry (drills, handsanders, vacuums are some of the more obvious items), and they seem to have had access to the studio's in-house piano as well. After a mere 30 seconds of checking the levels and 'practice', Nurse With Wound began recording their first album. Random plucks, plinks, scrapes, and blurts from the NWW arsenal erupt with varying densities of reverb to create a surprisingly rich space for these improvisations. Making up for their lack of real musical training with years of collecting obscure music, Stapleton and company sat aloof amongst their mess, conjuring their own means of communication to some otherworldly plane. Obviously, Stapleton had enough sense to recognize that the power of studio editing, and didn't release this as a direct-to-tape improvisation. Chance Meeting could be positioned between Faust, Pierre Henry, AMM, and Sun Ra, but Stapleton's own unique view of how such a meeting would sound and his own application of Surrealist thought kept this album from being merely a meeting of minds.
The exasperating catalogue of Nurse With Wound is filled with limited edition titles that might have been sold at an art show or a concert or for no other reason than because Steven Stapleton wanted to do it. So, there's ample opportunity to anthologize the NWW back catalogue of rarities, following the cd reissues originally on World Serpent which would tack on a compilation track or three to flesh out the material from an older lp. Creakiness originally came out in 1991 on a split lp through United Dairies; it appeared shortly thereafter on the Sugar Fish Drink anthology with a bunch of other NWW oddities; and now Creakiness gets headline status with the 'other misdemeanours' dating from 2004-2005 including some limited editions from the Echo Poeme sessions and a track from the "Having Fun With The Prince Of Darkness" single sold at a Current 93 gig in 2004. Got it?
Creakiness is an aptly named piece, as Stapleton builds his own machined music from door creaks and metal klanks, sliding these in and out of a forest folk interlude crafted by Joolie Wood and Tony Wakeford. Perhaps something akin to Vashti Bunyan trying to find common ground with Luigi Russolo and Pierre Henry. The Echo Poeme sessions take their inspiration from the stylized, cerebral dreaminess of the film Last Year At Marienbad. In all of the Echo Poeme sessions, Stapleton works with female French narrators whose whispered dictation expands into a narcoleptic glossolalia of delicately overlapping vocal fragments and abstractions. The Echo Poeme recordings found on this disc tend to be darker and more unnerving than on the more wildly available Echo Poeme Sequence 2. The horror sound design of "A Perfectly Natural Expectation" from that aforementioned single is a classic Stapleton piece of radioactive squiggles and bending atonal chorals. Brilliant as always.
Drunk With The Old Man Of The Mountains is a curious way to start reissuing all of the Nurse With Wound records again; but hey Nurse With Wound is not an outfit that adheres to the logic of market forces. As of the early months of 2005, only a handful of Nurse With Wound's amazing catalogue of psychic automatism and Dadaist strategies remain in print. Fortunately, the Canadian label Jhana (with help from Revolver Distribution) has begun the painstaking but necessary process of reissuing all of the albums that Nurse With Wound's former distributor World Serpent handled so poorly.
Originally released in 1987 as a very limited edition of 100 copies with original paintings by Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, Drunk With The Old Man enjoyed a second vinyl pressing in 2004 with reproductions of some of Stapleton's paintings gracing the cover. Essentially, Drunk With The Old Man was one of the many Nurse With Wound compilations that pulled extremely rare tracks of NWW compilation appearances, singles, and even tracks from his proper albums. "Mourning Smile" (1985) opens Drunk With The Old Man and while having been later published as a bonus track for the CD of Spiral Insana, this track is one of two pieces that debuted on this album. A quintessential NWW collage, "Mourning Smile" crawls through eerie drones and ragtime piano ditties, broken up by comically majestic church organ swells. "Swamp Rat" (1987) was from a split 12" with Current 93 called Faith's Favourites and later appeared on the Sugar Fish Drink compilation. Stapleton sets forth a primitive rhythmic thud through which he laces reverberations from vocal chorales, distant guitar squiggliness, and a constant giggling, punctuated by Stapleton himself muttering the title of the track. "Sheela-Na-Gig" (1984) is the other track to debut on this compilation, although it later appeared on Large Ladies With Cake in the Oven. Here, female shrieks and cackles (possibly from Stapleton's then partner Diana Rogerson) have been pitchshifted into an electronically mangled version of Diamanda Galas. "Astral Dustbin Dirge" is from the classic album Homotopie For Marie (1983), splattered with cut-ups of a man snoring and a woman orgasming amidst hyperbolic post-Pierre Henry musique concrete techniques. And finally, "Shattering Man Falling" from Live At Bar Maldoror album (1984) is evidence of the very short spell in which Nurse With Wound performed live. While the Bar Maldoror was something of a fictional space, the resulting recordings (which in all likelihood had been treated by Stapleton after the fact) are chaotic improvisations with found objects and whirring tape manipulations.
Hopefully, Jhana will continue marching through the NWW catalogue, and Drunk With The Old Man should stand as a fantastic introduction to Steven Stapleton's twisted art.
Nurse With Wound constructed Echo Poeme: Sequence No. 2 as an homage to the iconoclastic film Last Year At Marienbad by Alain Resnais from 1961. Taking cues from that film's coldly formalist but oddly dreamy cinematography, NWW's Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter present a 50 minute composition entirely based upon the French vocalizations from Amantine Dahan Steiner and Isabelle Gaborit. Their disembodied whispers, half-sung / half-spoken lullabies, melodic exhortations, excited gasps of air, seductive coos, and bewildered hums had been recorded in some intimate space, and then tangled together through a variety of simple cut-up techniques and variable delay patterns. It has to be said that the use of the delay pedal, when used in the hand of a novice and outside of the context of '70s dub, always runs the risk of sounding rinky-dink. But like :zoviet*france: who mastered the decontextualization of voice through multiple delay pedals and time lag accumulators on Look Into Me, Stapleton and Potter deftly steer these linguistic utterances into an eeriely calm web of echoing patterns, occasionally coupled by vibrational drones.
It should be noted that the first construction in the Echo Poem series was a cd-r only release to be sold at the2005 Salt Marie Celeste performance in Vienna by Stapleton, Potter, Diana Rogerson, and Matt Waldron. It was pretty much out of print even before anybody ever laid their eyes upon it. As a result, we haven't any in stock; but it appears that the second Echo Poeme has hearty distribution and should remain in print for some time.
"Funeral Music For Perez Prado" collects the two out of print Nurse With Wound EPs "Yagga Blues" (originally released in 1995 in conjunction with the "Who Can I Turn To Stereo?" album) and "Soresucker" (from 1990). While the two versions of "Yagga Blues"
The "Soresucker" ep is notable for "I Am The Poison" -- the slight remix of "Alas The Madonna Does Not Function," with Sol Invictus' Tony Wakeford gumbling something misanthropic and creating a simple groove on his bass.
Another mighty reissue of audio irritation (meant in the best possible way of course!) from Nurse With Wound. This CD with its guttural yet slippery title has been through the reissue campaign more times than we really need to mention, but we will say that the original 12" was released back in 1984 through L.A.Y.L.A.H. At that time, Steven Stapleton had just begun working with David Tibet in Current 93, and thus Stapleton invited Tibet to contribute some of his vocal growling to the Nurse cause, although the Tibet material on Gyllenskold could simply be out-take material from the Current 93 material of the day (Nature Unveilled); and it's vintage Tibet snarling through a series of devilish words which Stapleton twists even more so with his inimitable talents in the studio. Splattered throughout the phlegmatic collage are volatile transmissions of piercing noise, rhythmic metallic scrapes amassing into a seasick chorale of polyphonic alarm sires, banged gongs which rippled with varispeed warble, and blurting horns that could be sampled from some bloodcurdling Morricone soundtrack and mangled into something even more uncomfortable. As with much of the Nurse material from the early '80s, there's plenty of sounds that had become recurring elements for Stapleton, and this album is no exception. Stapleton's exceptional hand with a razor and a piece of tape certainly makes this, like many of his recordings, seminal avant-garde listening.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Homotopy For Marie" is nothing new to Aquarius, nor has it received a remastered make-over like it's predecessor "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table..." Yet, of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and I like a bunch of them!), this is my favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within "Homotopy For Marie," Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularties of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
"Homotopy For Marie" is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is
an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermitantly reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-decript distortion,feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
"Homotopy For Marie" is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is our favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermittently reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-descript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
Steven Stapleton has long appropriated those sounds which have interested him, recontextualizing them through the surrealist lens of Nurse With Wound. Robert Ashley's Automatic Music had worked its way into the minimalist masterpiece A Missing Sense. Brainticket begat Brained By Falling Masonry. Perez Prado and Jac Berocal feature in a pantheon of esoteric experimental music spelled out in the infamous Nurse With Wound list of influences that graced the first NWW record. There's even been a threat that Stapleton will produce a Nurse hip-hop record. Here on Huffin' Rag Blues, Stapleton turns to a familiar infatuation: exotica, easy listening, and lounge jazz records. Where the previous escapades had been deliriously fractured collages (i.e. The Sylvie And Babs Hi-Fi Companion), Huffin' Rag Blues is a bit more straight forward with slinky Martin Denny vibes and grooves dominating the album. Stapleton did make a pretty notable change in his production personnel as venerable technician Colin Potter takes a back seat to the occasionally brilliant Andrew Liles. The vocals which pop-up throughout the album hold the greatest sense of absurdity, as Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd) and Matt Waldron (aka irr. app. (ext.)) offer their eccentricities alongside some vocalists we don't quite recognize. It must be noted that Waldron's contribution has been a regular occurrence in the recent NWW performances with him adopting a Tom Waits / Beefheart croon to junked percussion tossed around.
Angry Eelectric Finger was a project that Steven Stapleton began back in 2003, having asked irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke to rework some unreleased Nurse With Wound material for three separate takes on three separate albums. The NWW material was known as the Zero Mix and was only made available as a bonus to those who pre-ordered the entire trilogy from Beta-Lactam. Well, near five years later, the Zero Mix resurfaces. This time Beta-Lactam has housed the music with a massive 220 page book filled with images of Stapleton's paintings. As for the music of the Zero Mix, it's classic Nurse With Wound, all dark, unsettling, and obtuse. A crawling loop of what sounds like detuned church bells plods along with some sort of hand-crank grinding, following much of what Stapleton and Colin Potter offered on Salt Marie Celeste. Elsewhere, the weirdo factor is turned up with some varispeed mutations on spring loaded plucked strings, which in turn recalls some of the oddball moments of Homotopy To Marie. Out of these sounds, some saxophone splutter creeps into the mix, marking the final available recordings from Xhol Caravan's Tim Belbe. Car crash white noise and hurdy-gurdy drones complete the media in the pastiche. For some reason, the cd is split into three tracks although there is no discernible difference with the vinyl, which only had two. While there's no text explaining the context of the artwork, each image looks to be painted on a repurposed lp, with Stapleton's psychedelic smears of bright, plastic paints with all sorts of Dali-esque squiggles, amoebas, hands, breasts, penises, and eyes making up a huge inventory of circular mandalas. Some of the last images, show all of these records mounted taxonomically on the wall, part of the installation of paintings that Stapleton did at the Burren School of Art, a few years back. Beautifully done.
Keep in mind that this is one of three variations in presenting Images / Zero Mix, as there's just the book (with no cd) and there's also a massive 14" x 7" box that holds both the book and cd with an entirely different second cd as well.
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, obviously with this elaborately packaged reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three lengthy cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position. First came a package from Matt Waldron of irr. app. (ext.) with reconditioned artwork for the original album; then came word that Robot Records' mastermind Kevin Spencer had painstakingly constructed a digital master from the original vinyl simply because he had loved the album so much. So when Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." And here we are, finally the reissue of Insect And Individual Silenced!
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and seering white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The final number is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
BACK IN PRINT!!!!
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, with this reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three original cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position, and as Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." That said, Insect was reissued through Raash Records in 2007, with that label dissolving amidst unseemly rumors; and now the album gets a proper reissue through Stapleton's United Dairies, complete with a lengthy bonus track that was commissioned for a unpublished 'suitcase edition' through Raash.
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and searing white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The third track is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal. This brings us to the the bonus track "Tooth, Teeth, Milk, Teeth, Skin" which is very much a contemporary collage of eerie female vocals looped into a mesmerizing ambience blown apart by harsh, musique concrete jump-cuts.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It's nearly impossible to get a hold of the back catalogue of Nurse With Wound records in this day and age; yet albums such as Homotopy To Marie, A Missing Sense, Spiral Insana, and Thunder Perfect Mind remain classics that really deserve to be heard by those who are willing to listen. While it remains to be seen if the NWW back catalogue will ever get properly reissued, at least Sanctuary has offered this double disc anthology collecting some of that back catalogue.
Nurse With Wound is the work of Steven Stapleton, the British sonic alchemist who's work has radically repurposed the signifiers of rock esoterica, musique concrete, and Surrealism into an aesthetic that is unlike anything that has come before him. Truly, Stapleton and his ongoing Nurse With Wound are the epitome of what it means to be avant-garde; but for all of the weighty elements that go into NWW, his body of work is touched by humor, empathy, and humanity rarely witnessed in fellow experimental musicians. Livin' Fear Of James Last culls the many, many fine releases from Nurse With Wound to arrive at this double disc set, taking tracks from Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, Second Pirate Sessions, Alas The Madonna Does Not Function, Automating Vol. 1 & 2, Who Can I Turn To Stereo, and many others. Like the previous NWW anthology The Swinging Reflective, Livin' Fear Of James Last makes for a fantastic listen, even if you do have all of the records as the rearrangement of Stapleton's original context puts all of these hybrid drones and mutant pop constructs in a new light. You really can't go wrong with this!
Like many of the Nurse With Wound albums, this has been out of print for quite some time now. Originally, Man With The Woman Face came out through World Serpent back in 2002, only to disappear when World Serpent came to an end. Now the album has been reissued, with new artwork and a limited edition bonus disc. Here's what we had to say about the album way back when:
Having retreated from London to an Irish farm many moons ago, Steve Stapleton has kept the personnel on his recent Nurse With Wound recordings down to just a few other people, with only David Tibet, Colin Potter, and Aranos appearing with any regularity. The Man With The Woman Face, Nurse With Wound's first album since 2000 finds Stapleton working exclusively with Ora's Colin Potter, who has recently been working with Monos and Jonathan Coleclough. Regardless of who's working with Stapleton, Nurse With Wound actively pursues (or stimulates?) bizarre psychological states, often via obtuse free-associations and recontextualized leitmotifs. While many Nurse With Wound recordings have recycled various elements from other albums into new operating theaters, the only recurring theme that Man With The Woman Face shares with previous albums is Stapleton's gentle use of feedback generated by chains of effects boxes looped back upon themselves to generate buzzing electric tones to be manipulated how he sees fit. Here, Stapleton and Potter flutter warm pulses of feedback to undergrid Spartan loops and skittering samples of little toy piano plucks, whirring motors, really angry bees, and something that sounds like an electronic varmint scurrying past its metallic cage into a pile of woodchips. Such strange whirring electronic sounds creak and moan until NWW bursts out of these oddly calming drones into a couple of minutes of nervous psychedelic grooviness that reminds us of the Sun City Girls (330,003 Crossdressers era), before collapsing back into whirring abstractions and murmuring vocal fragments. Nice.
One of two mailorder only / tour discs from Nurse With Wound that hadn't been available through any typical distribution channels, May The Fleas Of A Thousand Camels stitches together the minimal moments from two Nurse With Wound shows here in San Francisco back in 2006. Those shows marked the return of Nurse as a stage production after some two decades of refusing to perform live. Since then, Nurse has appeared on various stages in various countries in various guises. There's been a pretty steady touring core which has appeared alongside Steven Stapleton; those being Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, and Matt Waldron. Yup, that ensemble is present for these live sessions along with appearances from Stan Reed (Blue Sabbath Black Cheer), Moe! Staino, Richard Faulhaber, and a few others. Despite the large orchestra of sound-making potential, this album concentrates on the more minimal elements from those performances. Cyclical loops from the Nurse With Wound opus Salt Marie Celeste pop up throughout the set, although much less so than from what we can remember from the live shows themselves. Nevertheless, Stapleton and company were setting out to make dark music; and dark, shadowy, Dada-industrial sounds are what you will find here! Horror soundtrack slashes from atonal drone swell and collapse amidst hand-stewn squiggles, electronic errata, bizarre pig-like grunts, unsettled gasps for air, and the unexpected sounds that we have all come to expect from Nurse With Wound. The amount of space and those cyclical loops which return throughout the album certainly align this with the aforementioned Salt Marie Celeste, but also with some of the earlier masterpieces of unsettled Nurse With Wound minimalism - Homotopy To Marie, Soliloquy For Lilith, and A Missing Sense.
