NUMINOUS EYE With A Little Help (aRCHIVE) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

NURSE WITH WOUND A Sucked Orange / Scrag (United Dirter) 2cd 25.00
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!
MPEG Stream: "Pleasant Banjo Intro with Irritating Squeak"
MPEG Stream: "Man Is The Animal"
MPEG Stream: "Crack Up"
MPEG Stream: "Ritva Sings For The World"
MPEG Stream: "Wisecrack"

NURSE WITH WOUND Alice The Goon (United Daries) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Stapleton begins his latest 30 minutes of madness with a groovy mambo loop that brings NWW closest to the late-show hallucinations found on "Sylvie and Babs," topped off with an out-of control guitar solo phasing in and out. Oddly enough, it draws close plunderphonic comparisons to the exotica trickery from People Like Us or Stock, Hausen, & Walkman. "Alice The Goon" drones off into a prog-jazz mantra with an undeterminable horned instrument and erractically plucked bass string. The cd version features an exceptional bonus track of mesmeric layers of deeply processed vocals.

NURSE WITH WOUND Alice The Goon (Jnana) cd ep 14.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "(I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares"
MPEG Stream: "Prelude To Alice The Goon"
MPEG Stream: "Untitled"

NURSE WITH WOUND Alice The Goon (United Daries) 12" 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Stapleton begins his latest 20 minutes of madness with a groovy mambo loop that brings NWW closest to the late-show hallucinations found on "Sylvie and Babs," topped off with an out-of control guitar solo phasing in and out. Oddly enough, it draws close plunderphonic comparisons to the exotica trickery from People Like Us or Stock, Hausen, & Walkman. "Alice The Goon" drones off into a prog-jazz mantra with an undeterminable horned instrument and erractically plucked bass string. The lp has a really amazing etched surface on the b-side.

NURSE WITH WOUND An Awkward Pause (United Dairies) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.

NURSE WITH WOUND Automating Vol 1 (United Dairies) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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 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". 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.
RealAudio clip: "I Was No Longer His Dominant"
RealAudio clip: "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree"

NURSE WITH WOUND Automating Vol. 1 (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "I Was No Longer His Dominant"
MPEG Stream: "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree"

NURSE WITH WOUND Automating Vol. 3 (United Dairies) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
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!
MPEG Stream: "Beetle Crawls Across My Back"
MPEG Stream: "Ubu Noir"
MPEG Stream: "Nosedive (remix of Cadaverous Condition)"

NURSE WITH WOUND Automating Volume Two (United Dairies) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.
RealAudio clip: "Old Man River / Dance Of Fools"
RealAudio clip: "Human, Human, Human"

NURSE WITH WOUND Chance Meeting Of A Defective Tape Machine And A Migraine (United Dairies / Anomalous) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. 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!!!
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine and An Umbrella (Jnana) cd 16.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Two Mock Projections"
MPEG Stream: "The Six Buttons Of Sex Appeal"
MPEG Stream: "Blank Capsules Of Embroidered Cellophane"

NURSE WITH WOUND Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine and An Umbrella ( United Dirter) 2lp 31.00
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.
This vinyl reissue of Chance Meeting features the original tracking on one of the LPs with the second piece of vinyl sporting the bonus track "Strain Crack Break" which appeared on the 2001 CD reissue of Chance Meeting. Here, David Tibet recites all of the band names found on the infamous NWW list, alongside a kaleidoscopic collage from Stapleton and Colin Potter, all of which was recorded 22 years later than the original sessions.
MPEG Stream: "Two Mock Projections"
MPEG Stream: "The Six Buttons Of Sex Appeal"
MPEG Stream: "Blank Capsules Of Embroidered Cellophane"

NURSE WITH WOUND Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine and An Umbrella (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
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.
MPEG Stream: "Two Mock Projections"
MPEG Stream: "The Six Buttons Of Sex Appeal"
MPEG Stream: "Blank Capsules Of Embroidered Cellophane"

NURSE WITH WOUND Creakiness And Other Misdemeanours (United Jnana) cd 14.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Creakiness"
MPEG Stream: "Sand Tangled Women Part Two"
MPEG Stream: "Little Dipper Minus Two"

NURSE WITH WOUND Drunk With The Old Man Of The Mountains (United Jhana) cd 14.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Mourning Smile"
MPEG Stream: "Swamp Rat"
MPEG Stream: "Astral Dustbin Drige"

NURSE WITH WOUND Echo Poeme : Sequence No. 2 (Durtro / Jnana) cd 14.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Echo Poeme : Sequence No. 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Funeral Music For Perez Prado (United Dairies) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"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" aren't the most exciting NWW tracks -- just a tripped out bongo loop both with and without a stoned woman reciting a strange monologue -- the extended version of "Funeral Music For Perez Prado" (the b-side to "Yagga Blues") is amazing. Stapleton has constructed a beautifully haunting drone from Japanese flute played by Organum's David Jackman, to rival "Soliloquy for Lilith" and "Sadness of Things" as his best deep listening pieces.
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.

NURSE WITH WOUND Gyllenskold, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's (United Jnana) cd 15.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Several Odd Moments Prior To Lunch"
MPEG Stream: "Phenomenon Of Aquarium And Bearded Lady"
MPEG Stream: "Dirty Fingernails"

NURSE WITH WOUND Homotopy For Marie (United Dairies) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. 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.

NURSE WITH WOUND Homotopy To Marie (United Jnana) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.
MPEG Stream: "I Cannot Feel You As The Dogs..."
MPEG Stream: "Homotopy To Marie"
MPEG Stream: "Astral Dustbin Dirge"

NURSE WITH WOUND Homotopy To Marie (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is quite possibly our favorite. Perhaps because it 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 we 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. The rest of the album is a clutter of nondescript 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.
MPEG Stream: "I Cannot Feel You As The Dogs..."
MPEG Stream: "Homotopy To Marie"

NURSE WITH WOUND Huffin' Rag Blues (United Jnana) cd 14.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Black Teeth"
MPEG Stream: "Cruisin' For A Bruisin'"
MPEG Stream: "Juice Head Crazy Lady"

NURSE WITH WOUND Images / Zero Mix (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd + book 37.00
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.
MPEG Stream: "Track 1 (excerpt)"
MPEG Stream: "Track 2 (excerpt)"

NURSE WITH WOUND Insect And Individual Silenced (Raash / United Dairies) cd 25.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.
MPEG Stream: "Alvin's Funeral"
MPEG Stream: "Absent Old Queen Underfoot"
MPEG Stream: "Mutiles De Guerre"

NURSE WITH WOUND Insect And Individual Silenced (Expanded Edition) (United Dairies) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
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.
MPEG Stream: "Alvin's Funeral"
MPEG Stream: "Absent Old Queen Underfoot"
MPEG Stream: "Mutiles De Guerre"

NURSE WITH WOUND Live At Bar Maldoror (United Dairies) cd 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

NURSE WITH WOUND Livin' Fear Of James Last (Castle) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. 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 stuff.
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!
MPEG Stream: "Sea Armchair"
MPEG Stream: "Cold (Edit)"
MPEG Stream: "Rock 'n' Roll Station (Edit)"

NURSE WITH WOUND Man With The Woman Face (w/ Bonus Disc) (ICR / United Dairies) 2cd 30.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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.
MPEG Stream: "Beware The African Mosquito"
MPEG Stream: "Ag Canadh Thuas Sa Speir"
MPEG Stream: "White Light From The Stars In Your Mind"

NURSE WITH WOUND May The Fleas Of A Thousand Camels Infest Your Armpits (United Dairies) cd 15.98
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.
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 2"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 9"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 14"

NURSE WITH WOUND Od Lot (United Dairies) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK!!!
The title pretty much says it all, if you were to pronounce it "odd lot." That should go without saying for any given Nurse With Wound record, and this one certainly qualifies, even though technically Od Lot shouldn't be considered a proper Nurse With Wound record. Rather, this is a four-way split between the four touring members of Nurse -- Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, and Matt Waldron - each offering a set of solo tracks. Colin Potter's pieces are worth the price of admission alone, with the first being a creepy, creepy horrordrone that ranks as some of the finest that we've heard from Colin. Hissing pulses swell into an undergirding rhythm that guides a series of undulating, arching tones. Much closer to a really dark Biosphere or maybe even some of the later digitally sculpted Zoviet France pieces. His second piece plods with a mechanoid plod culminating in a huge guitar crescendo. It's surprisingly straight forward for a Nurse With Wound project; but it's actually pretty damn amazing, more like a brighty rendered Troum or Nadja piece. Mr. Liles offers a series of dada-exotica following his contributions to The Bacteria Magnet with some fucked-up skronk laced around slinky disco cuts with funky wah-wah guitars and freakish whisperings upfront in the mix. The Stapleton track features a vulgar rant by Hazel Two-Twigs against an unknown Texan hipster, who probably had "it" coming to him; and Stapleton's backing noise is a signature, wild collage of splutter, squiggle, low-slung prog basslines clinging to a breakcore rhythm (remember his long-promised hip-hop album?). Waldron's solo track is a splattered semi-improv number for bass, guitar, and drums, more in keeping with what's been found on his Perekluchenie album and some of the proggy live material he's done as irr. app. (ext.) in recent years.
MPEG Stream: COLIN POTTER "A Jigsaw With 2 Pieces"
MPEG Stream: ANDREW LILES "Toad In The Hole"
MPEG Stream: STEVEN STAPLETON "Fine Writin'"
MPEG Stream: M.S. WALDRON "Let Sleeping Toads Lie"

NURSE WITH WOUND Paranoia In Hi-Fi (United Dirter) cd 4.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Here's a special sampler disc that was intended to sell for only 99 pence in the UK; but even with the horrible exchange rate and shipping costs, Paranoia In Hi-Fi is still a reasonable $4.98 on this side of the pond. BUT! There's a catch. You have to walk in the door of Aquarius and buy this disc in person! The idea that Nurse With Wound, Dirter Promotions, and Cargo Distribution collectively had, was to encourage the multitudes of Nurse With Wound fans and newcomers to get out into the independent shops and maybe purchase something else alongside this nicely priced cd... so no mailorder for this.
Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound has engineered this anthology as a teasing sampler into the wild and weird world of NWW, by collaging the tracks into a seamless mix and then splicing that collage into 79 separate tracks, making it downright foolish to rip this thing into mp3s. Yup, this is a mega-mix meant to be listened to from beginning to end. True to NWW form, it's a rollercoaster of dada cut-ups, splattered noise, horrifying ambience, post-krautrock jams, and psychedelically inclined musique concrete. We do hear bits from The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion, Homotopy To Marie, the Stereolab collaboration, Alice The Goon, the hilarious NWW mash-up with James Chance, and the Inflatable Sideshow alter ego which appropriates Black Sabbath of all things. To all of these things, we here at Aquarius once again say "Thank you, Mr. Stapleton!"

NURSE WITH WOUND Rat Tapes One (United Dairies) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Rat Tapes One may be the first in a series of outtakes and unreleased material from the vast back catalogue of Nurse With Wound. If the quality and diversity of material found on the first volume is indicative of what's to come, then we are going to be in for some serious treats for the next many years! Rat Tapes One also marks the return of United Dairies, the label run by NWW's Steven Stapleton, after years of inactivity, as other labels had been releasing Stapleton's records. What ultimately makes this album so fascinating is the range of production strategies and alchemical variations differentiating these recordings from those that actually made it on the various NWW records. Take for example, the opening number, a cover of Patty Water's "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" originally found on She And Me Fall Together In Free Death where the drone guitar has faded into the distance behind a series of dark funereal bells (probably the same used on the Angry Eeletric Finger sessions) and Stapleton's voice twisted into a helium saturated cartoon of the original. Proving that the 1992 seminal album Thunder Perfect Mind was a true labor of love, Stapleton presents at least four different outtakes of the xylophonic percussion matched with the digital scrubbing sound that became the signature of that album. Even for the die-hard NWW fans here, some of the material is hard to place, especially where the sounds for the fucked-up drum 'n' bass number (seriously!) came from. While Rat Tapes One was originally sold at the 2006 NWW shows here in San Francisco for the fans hungry for more material, Rat Tapes One also makes an exceptional introduction into the surrealist tinged, psych-damaged collages that Stapleton has made as NWW for well over two decades now.
MPEG Stream: "Track 1"
MPEG Stream: "Track 7"
MPEG Stream: "Track 12"

NURSE WITH WOUND Rock 'N' Roll Station (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 14.98
Slowly. Very slowly, the entire Nurse With Wound back catalogue is getting the reissue treatment; and in the absurdist spirit of Nurse With Wound, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which these titles are making an appearance. Originally, Rock 'N' Roll Station appeared back in 1994, as an homage to one of Steven Stapleton's heroes Jac Berrocal, the French avant-jazz musician with a occasional taste for obtuse pop. The title track on this Nurse With Wound album is in fact a cover of Berrocal's most well known song, although by now, more people probably know of the song through Stapleton's remake rather than the other way around. Similar to the way that Stapleton / Thirlwell reconstructed Brainticket's lysergic funk and how Stapleton remade Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, the NWW version of Rock 'N' Roll station is pretty faithful to the original, even if the original was pretty weird to begin with. There's a steady metronomic pulse (which Beta-Lactam have qualified as 'proto-hip-hop,' c'mon... it's a drum machine replicating the same drum pattern that Berrocal scripted back in the '70s) grounding warbled tones and Stapleton's repeating monologue about the infinite possibilities to be found within a Rock 'N' Roll Station, even if he is still "waiting for Michael." All of the other tracks on Rock 'N' Roll Station are essentially variations on the theme of the title track with a similarly laid-back rhythm acting as a foundation upon which Stapleton splatters the stereo field with distorted squigglings, gurgling vocalizations, looping snippets from Perez Prado's mambos, fingernails on the chalk board scrapes, and ghastly drones extracted from the ether. The pronounced use of rhythm on Rock 'N' Roll Station has rubbed some of the die-hard NWW fans the wrong way, but when has Nurse With Wound ever been easy to digest, even when it just might be one of the grooviest and most ecstatic albums he's ever produced? Oh yeah, there's a 'bonus' track (the "1.35 pm Remix") on this version of Rock 'N' Roll Station which was originally released as part of the Second Pirate Sessions of reworkings of the material from Rock 'N' Roll Station. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Rock'n'Roll Station"
MPEG Stream: "2 Golden Microphones"

NURSE WITH WOUND Rock 'N' Roll Station (Beta-Lactam Ring) 2lp 33.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Now available on vinyl!!
Slowly. Very slowly, the entire Nurse With Wound back catalogue is getting the reissue treatment; and in the absurdist spirit of Nurse With Wound, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which these titles are making an appearance. Originally, Rock 'N' Roll Station appeared back in 1994, as an homage to one of Steven Stapleton's heroes Jac Berrocal, the French avant-jazz musician with a occasional taste for obtuse pop. The title track on this Nurse With Wound album is in fact a cover of Berrocal's most well known song, although by now, more people probably know of the song through Stapleton's remake rather than the other way around. Similar to the way that Stapleton / Thirlwell reconstructed Brainticket's lysergic funk and how Stapleton remade Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, the NWW version of Rock 'N' Roll station is pretty faithful to the original, even if the original was pretty weird to begin with. There's a steady metronomic pulse (which Beta-Lactam have qualified as 'proto-hip-hop,' c'mon... it's a drum machine replicating the same drum pattern that Berrocal scripted back in the '70s) grounding warbled tones and Stapleton's repeating monologue about the infinite possibilities to be found within a Rock 'N' Roll Station, even if he is still "waiting for Michael." All of the other tracks on Rock 'N' Roll Station are essentially variations on the theme of the title track with a similarly laid-back rhythm acting as a foundation upon which Stapleton splatters the stereo field with distorted squigglings, gurgling vocalizations, looping snippets from Perez Prado's mambos, fingernails on the chalk board scrapes, and ghastly drones extracted from the ether. The pronounced use of rhythm on Rock 'N' Roll Station has rubbed some of the die-hard NWW fans the wrong way, but when has Nurse With Wound ever been easy to digest, even when it just might be one of the grooviest and most ecstatic albums he's ever produced? Oh yeah, there's a 'bonus' track (the "1.35 pm Remix") on this version of Rock 'N' Roll Station which was originally released as part of the Second Pirate Sessions of reworkings of the material from Rock 'N' Roll Station. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Rock'n'Roll Station"
MPEG Stream: "2 Golden Microphones"

NURSE WITH WOUND Salt Marie Celeste (United Dairies) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Before I get into any critique of this, I have to say that Salt Marie Celeste is easily the best Nurse With Wound record in years!
Throughout the 25 years of Nurse With Wound recordings, Steven Stapleton has actively pursued audio manifestations of Surrealism, often hypothesizing on what Surrealists like Andre Breton or Tristan Tzara might do if they had access to contemporary recording technology but still maintaining their bastardizations of Victorian aesthetics. Recently on recordings like Man with the Woman Face or Alice the Goon, NWW embraced obtuse free associations to build dense sound puzzles of dead-end jokes, absurd parataxis, and general confusion. However, Salt Marie Celeste is far simpler an application of Surrealism, as Stapleton renders NWW a vehicle for psychological horror. For this album, Stapleton and studio wizard Colin Potter (who has been the only other collaborator with NWW for the past couple of releases) have drawn from Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic" for inspiration; however, NWW never dwells in the lulling pathos which characterizes Bryars' composition. Instead, Salt Marie Celeste is a relentless album which imagines the tidal currents around the Titanic's demise as an inhumanly cold force steadily bringing the doomed ship to the bottom of the ocean. Through a series of looping mechanisms, Stapleton and Potter build a massive orchestration of fluctuations which swell and dissipate with an unnerving regularity. The central element to the compostition is an ominous wave of electronic sound which constantly tumbles forward. Fans of NWW will recognize this from the super limited edition Music from the Horse Hospital 2cd, yet done much more effectively here. Wooden creaks and moans emerge from this gravity well of sound, before breaking up and disappearing amidst the tidal wave of intensity. For the references to the Titanic (or at least in Bryars' composition), Salt Marie Celeste conjures suffocating and bleak images of ghost ships mysteriously appearing on the horizon.
Regardless, this is clearly one of Nurse With Wound's best and should not be missed!
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Salt Marie Celeste (United Jnana) cd 14.98
BACK IN STOCK (reissued, in fact) and that's a good thing. It's cheaper than before, too. Here's what we said back when the United Dairies version came out in 2003:
Before I get into any critique of this, I have to say that Salt Marie Celeste is easily the best Nurse With Wound record in years! Throughout the 25 years of Nurse With Wound recordings, Steven Stapleton has actively pursued audio manifestations of Surrealism, often hypothesizing on what Surrealists like Andre Breton or Tristan Tzara might do if they had access to contemporary recording technology but still maintaining their bastardizations of Victorian aesthetics. Recently on recordings like Man with the Woman Face or Alice the Goon, NWW embraced obtuse free associations to build dense sound puzzles of dead-end jokes, absurd parataxis, and general confusion. However, Salt Marie Celeste is far simpler an application of Surrealism, as Stapleton renders NWW a vehicle for psychological horror. For this album, Stapleton and studio wizard Colin Potter (who has been the only other collaborator with NWW for the past couple of releases) have drawn from Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic" for inspiration; however, NWW never dwells in the lulling pathos which characterizes Bryars' composition. Instead, Salt Marie Celeste is a relentless album which imagines the tidal currents around the Titanic's demise as an inhumanly cold force steadily bringing the doomed ship to the bottom of the ocean. Through a series of looping mechanisms, Stapleton and Potter build a massive orchestration of fluctuations which swell and dissipate with an unnerving regularity. The central element to the compostition is an ominous wave of electronic sound which constantly tumbles forward. Fans of NWW will recognize this from the super limited edition Music from the Horse Hospital 2cd, yet done much more effectively here. Wooden creaks and moans emerge from this gravity well of sound, before breaking up and disappearing amidst the tidal wave of intensity. For the references to the Titanic (or at least in Bryars' composition), Salt Marie Celeste conjures suffocating and bleak images of ghost ships mysteriously appearing on the horizon.
Regardless, this is clearly one of Nurse With Wound's best and should not be missed!
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "excerpt 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) 2cd 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

NURSE WITH WOUND Second Pirate Sessions (United Dairies) lp 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.

NURSE WITH WOUND She And Me Fall Together In Free Death (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 15.98
She And Me Fall Together In Free Death is the first Nurse With Wound album in quite some time not to be released on the United Dairies label. Portland's Beta-lactam Ring had the good fortune of acquiring the record, which certainly fits in with their impressive catalog (Legendary Pink Dots, Troum, Coil, Reynols, and much other avant-garde madness). Yet the change of labels for Nurse With Wound doesn't alter their conceptual pursuits. There's plenty of Surrealist juxtaposition, arcane musical references, and just a general celebration of high weirdness. As on the past couple of NWW records, here the group is paired down to just Steven Stapleton and his trusted engineer Colin Potter; but what is certainly unique about "She And Me..." is that it features a cover of ESP jazz vocalist Patty Waters' "Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair," which finds Stapleton singing for the first time on any of his recordings. The darkly blurred, droned 'n' drugged folk rendition of that song recalls Stapleton's previous collaboration with Sol Invictus' Tony Wakeford on the "Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish" album. The album makes an abrupt turn with a variety of musique concrete squiggles and free-floating particles of decontextualized sound amidst a very naughty piece of narration. An extended version of the title track with its motorik Krautrock propulsion that mirrors Faust's complex psycho-trances is the bonus which all of those patient enough for the CD get to enjoy.
MPEG Stream: "She And Me Fall Together Like Free Death"
MPEG Stream: "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair"

NURSE WITH WOUND She And Me Fall Together In Free Death (Beta-Lactam Ring) lp 19.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"She And Me Fall Together In Free Death" is the first Nurse With Wound album in quite some time not to be released on the United Dairies label. Portland's Beta-lactam Ring had the good fortune of acquiring the record, which certainly fits in with their impressive catalog (Legendary Pink Dots, Troum, Coil, Reynols, and much other avant-garde madness). Yet the change of labels for Nurse With Wound doesn't alter their conceptual pursuits. There's plenty of Surrealist juxtaposition, arcane musical references, and just a general celebration of high weirdness. As on the past couple of NWW records, here the group is paired down to just Steven Stapleton and his trusted engineer Colin Potter; but what is certainly unique about "She And Me..." is that it opens with a cover of ESP jazz vocalist Patty Waters' "Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair," which finds Stapleton singing for the first time on any of his recordings. The darkly blurred, droned 'n' drugged folk rendition of that song recalls Stapleton's previous collaboration with Sol Invictus' Tony Wakeford on the "Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish" album. The rest of that side of the record devolves into a variety of musique concrete squiggles and free-floating particles of decontextualized sound. Side two revs up the motorik Krautrock propulsion with a considerable march that mirrors Faust's complex psycho-trances. It's unclear how long the vinyl version will stay in print... so don't delay!

NURSE WITH WOUND Shipwreck Radio Volume One (ICR) 2cd 25.00
The last performance of Nurse With Wound was back in the early '80s. Due to the fact that NWW mastermind Steven Stapleton considered the performance a failure, he has turned down all subsequent invitations for live performances that have come his way. As of December 2005, rumors had been floating around that Stapleton may change his tune, given his recent appearances at record release parties arranged by the Beta-Lactam label up in Portland. While it remains to be seen if Stapleton will ever make that long-awaited return to the stage, he did accept a artist-in-residency invitation from the Lofoten International Art Festival curated by Rob Young and Anne Hilde-Neste of The Wire. So in the summer of 2004, Stapleton and his trusted engineer / collaborator Colin Potter made the trek up to the Norwegian fishing village of Svolvaer, with limited recording equipment and no musical instruments to produce a series of recording based on the environmental sounds of that tiny fishing village. Upon completing these recordings, the two then broadcast them upon the maritime radio channels at unannounced intervals, probably to the dismay of the Norwegian fisherman. Nurse With Wound made twenty-four of such transmissions during their Norwegian sabbatical. And perhaps this marks the first in a series drawn from those very fertile recording sessions. Shipwreck Radio Volume One features a precursor to what may be the infamous forthcoming Nurse With Wound hip-hop album with some crunchy breakbeats crafted from the clanging of fishing trawlers; but the bulk of the album follows with the ominous hypno-drone that Stapleton put forth on Salt Marie Celeste and Soliloquy For Lilith. Sonar blips and vocal utterances (some comical, but most mutated beyond decipherability) dot the lunar drones, noxious tea-kettle whistlings, and lumbering swells of sound that sway with motion sickness. The midnight sun never sounded so good.
MPEG Stream: "June 3"
MPEG Stream: "June 5"
MPEG Stream: "June 15"

NURSE WITH WOUND Shipwreck Radio Volume Two (ICR) 2cd 25.00
In 2004, Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound) accepted an artist-in-residency invitation from the Lofoten International Art Festival curated by Rob Young and Anne Hilde-Neset of The Wire. So in the summer of 2004, Stapleton and his trusted engineer / collaborator Colin Potter made the trek up to the Norwegian fishing village of Svolvaer, with limited recording equipment and no musical instruments to produce a series of recording based on the environmental sounds of that tiny fishing village. Upon completing these recordings, the two then broadcast them upon the maritime radio channels at unannounced intervals, probably to the dismay of the Norwegian fisherman. Nurse With Wound made twenty-four such transmissions during their Norwegian sabbatical.
This double disc set marks the second set of recordings from those very fertile sessions. Stapleton admitted that there very little to gather in the Arctic expansiveness during the relative quiet of Norwegian summers; not surprisingly, emptiness is what Stapleton builds upon as the foundation for many of these recordings. Birds, surf, and a repeating radio ping appear to really be the only things that Stapleton and Potter appear to be able to work with; but they exhibit a masterful ability when transforming these sounds into ominous hypnotic drones and swirling atmospheres reflective of the more contemplative parts of Thunder Perfect Mind or the subtle minimalism of Soliloquy For Lilith. As on the first session, Shipwreck Radio Volume Two also features a curious metallic breakbeat number, reflecting Stapleton's ongoing obsession with hip hop, albeit filtered through his inimitable Surrealist gaze. Highly recommended.
MPEG Stream: "June 19"
MPEG Stream: "July 4"
MPEG Stream: "July 21"

NURSE WITH WOUND Shipwreck Radio: Final Broadcasts (ICR) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When Steven Stapleton set out to make his seminal album Thunder Perfect Mind, he was intent on actualizing his idea of industrial music. Not what industrial music had become in 1992 with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and the Wax Trax! contingent of angry synthesists, but more of what Luigi Russolo had in mind with his Futurist noise-making objects Intonarumori. That same spirit of harnessing the mechanical orchestrations of industrial production holds true to the final chapter of Shipwreck Radio, a three volume series of radio broadcasts commissioned for the Lofoten International Art Festival and transmitted to the Norwegian fishing village of Svolvaer. While Thunder Perfect Mind focused on machinists hammering through a brilliant idiosyncrasy of instrumentation, the haunted sounds from the Shipwreck Radio series engage the monolithic architecture of the industrial workplace: huge cavernous reverberation, thunderous drones, metallic bellowings, and gasping exhalations of steam, acetylene, and oxygen. The first of the two extended tracks on the final chapter of the Shipwreck Radio sessions returns to this same material; and even though there's plenty of variations in the sounds found in the first two chapters, this piece finds Stapleton and collaborator Colin Potter in magnificent form. The second track is a bit of head-scratcher, though as it's little more than a DSP time-stretched applique of some vocal samples. The first track more than makes up for what the second lacks and is a noble finale to what is already a great body of work.
MPEG Stream: "July 13"
MPEG Stream: "June 22"

NURSE WITH WOUND Soliloquy For Lilith (United Dairies) 2cd 24.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"The record is fucking amazing," or so says Nurse With Wound protagonist Steven Stapleton. Originally released as a triple vinyl set in 1988 (though references have been made to a mysterious additional 12" released in 1989), "Soliloquy For Lilith" got the CD reissue back 1993, standing as one of the pinnacles within the Nurse With Wound pantheon of surreal records. The iconography of Lilith is a rich and often divergent set of references, beginning with an ancient story (possibly of ancient Babylonian origin, but merged into Jewish mysticism) of Lilith being the first woman (predating Eve's birth from Adam's rib) who chose not to live in the Garden of Eden. While contemporary feminists have taken Lilith as a role model of independence from masculine authorship (i.e. Lilith Fair), Lilith has often been associated with supernatural tendencies with Qabalist scholars qualifying her as a demoness instead of human, manifesting herself as the 'hidden' second moon that circles the Earth. For his "Soliloquy For Lilith," Stapleton opts for the archaic readings of Lilith and presents NWW's mellowest album as a brooding contemplation of Lilith as an archetypal source for unknown magicks. Here, six extended mantras flutter through an ambience created by the closed loop of various effects pedals and flangers, cycling through the built-in harmonics from those electronic elements as tidal rhythms and hums. The resulting album rivals any of the ambient records from Brian Eno and Klaus Schultz, adding a decidedly menacingly feel to the ambient blueprint.
RealAudio clip: "Soliloquy For Lilith 1"
RealAudio clip: "Soliloquy For Lilith 3"

NURSE WITH WOUND Soliloquy For Lilith (Durtro / Jnana) 3cd 45.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Finally back in print!!
"The record is fucking amazing," or so says Nurse With Wound protagonist Steven Stapleton. So fucking amazing in fact that he's issued "Soliloquy For Lilith" in a handful of different editions. Originally released as a triple vinyl set in 1988 (though references have been made to a mysterious additional 12" released in 1989), "Soliloquy For Lilith" got the CD reissue back in 1993, standing as one of the pinnacles within the Nurse With Wound pantheon of surreal records. Now 12 years after the first CD pressing (which was a double CD), Stapleton has re-issued this masterpiece as a triple disc to mirror of the triple vinyl edition, and he's produced two extra tracks of contemporary material that perfectly complement the original tracks.
The iconography of Lilith is a rich and often divergent set of references, beginning with an ancient story (possibly of ancient Babylonian origin, but merged into Jewish mysticism) of Lilith being the first woman (predating Eve's birth from Adam's rib) who chose not to live in the Garden of Eden. While contemporary feminists have taken Lilith as a role model of independence from masculine authorship (i.e. Lilith Fair), Lilith has often been associated with supernatural tendencies with Qabalist scholars qualifying her as a demoness instead of human, manifesting herself as the 'hidden' second moon that circles the Earth. For his "Soliloquy For Lilith," Stapleton opts for the archaic readings of Lilith, or perhaps a far more personal one as Lilith is the name of his daughter. This is Nurse With Wound's mellowest album as a brooding contemplation of Lilith as an archetypal source for unknown magicks. Here, extended mantras flutter through an ambience created by the closed loop of various effects pedals and flangers, cycling through the built-in harmonics from those electronic elements as tidal rhythms and hums. The resulting album rivals any of the ambient records of Brian Eno and Klaus Schultz, adding a decidedly menacing feel to the ambient blueprint.
Yes, we certainly agree that this record is fucking amazing.
MPEG Stream: "Soliloquy For Lilith (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Soliloquy For Lilith (excerpt 2)"
MPEG Stream: "Soliloquy For Lilith (excerpt 3)"

NURSE WITH WOUND Soundpooling (ICR) cd 17.98
In May 2005, Steven Stapleton arranged for three performances in Vienna for his grimly aquatic Nurse With Wound composition Salt Marie Celeste, but he was quick to announce that those performances were not to be billed as Nurse With Wound gigs, as a long-awaited NWW return to the stage would not occur 'til a year later here in San Francisco. One has to wonder if those shows should now be qualified as NWW performances as recordings of those very performances found here on Soundpooling are now credited to Nurse With Wound. Details, details, details.
At the time, Stapleton had been working on the Echo Poeme series, as an intimately creepy affair for disembodied voices, a soundworld of appearing and disappearing vocals, female wraiths of breath, half-melodies, and fragmented proclamations. Inevitably, some of those same sounds churn within the relentless, creaking swells, easily identified as coming from Salt Marie Celeste. Of course, Stapleton would never allow himself to simply offer a perfunctory recreation of any of his previous recordings for a live setting and employed a gaggle of audio misfits to inject their own seasick madness into the oceanic themes of Salt Marie Celeste. Colin Potter, as always, was present alongside Matt Waldron (aka irr. app. (ext.)), Andrew Liles, and Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd). The quintet offered a panoply of lunar vibrations, mechanically squawking birds, tightly wound clatter, eerily plucked strings, and damp atmospheres to complement and augment the original recordings of Salt Marie Celeste for an equally haunted result. With numerous bootlegs of these performances floating around the internet, Stapleton and co. wisely offered the official version of Soundpooling with an unreleased studio track called "In Swollen Silence" which extracted bloodcurdling exhortations from Frieda Abtan's ominously growling voice as a surreal bout of violence to counterpoint the sublime unease of the live sessions. Very nice indeed.
MPEG Stream: "Soundpooling #3"
MPEG Stream: "In Swollen Silence"

NURSE WITH WOUND Space Music (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 15.98
So here's a question that may not need to be answered: did Pink Floyd come up with the idea of hosting lazer shows in planetariums for Dark Side of the Moon or was it a groundswell of psychedelically minded astronomers who took up the cause independently of the band? Obviously, a planetarium would make for a fantastic venue for a psychedelically bent excursion for light and sound. Just drop a tab or pull a hit, sit back in a comfortable space surrounded by kaleidoscopic lazer effects with decent surround sound, and go for a cosmic trip. So, why not have something other than what has become a yawning standard of the planetarium soundtrack? Why not something really lysergic like Nurse With Wound?
In Melbourne, Australia, somebody's willing to explore the cosmos with something far more alien and far more challenging; thus the commission for Nurse With Wound to score a piece for the Melbourne Planetarium's Science In The Dark Series. On the whole, this is a quiet subliminal piece of music with eerie charges of electricity and echoing pools of sustained pure tones, all of which set against low hovering rumbles and deep-gasping drones. Yup, Stapleton (here working with Colin Potter and Andrew Liles) has successfully sutured together the strategies for tonal beauty from his immaculate Soliloquy To Lilith with the very special nothing music of A Missing Sense. While 95 percent of Space Music is cosmic solitude and deep-space floating for Nurse With Wound, the other 5 percent is filled with huge ruptures of exploding noise burst forth during an early interlude of the album, followed by mangled bits of alien speech. Pretty awe-inspiring as with most every Nurse With Wound record. It probably would sound pretty fucking great in a Planetarium, too!
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Space Music (Beta-Lactam Ring) lp 24.00
NOW ON VINYL!!!!!!
So here's a question that may not need to be answered: did Pink Floyd come up with the idea of hosting lazer shows in planetariums for Dark Side of the Moon or was it a groundswell of psychedelically minded astronomers who took up the cause independently of the band? Obviously, a planetarium would make for a fantastic venue for a psychedelically bent excursion for light and sound. Just drop a tab or pull a hit, sit back in a comfortable space surrounded by kaleidoscopic lazer effects with decent surround sound, and go for a cosmic trip. So, why not have something other than what has become a yawning standard of the planetarium soundtrack? Why not something really lysergic like Nurse With Wound?
In Melbourne, Australia, somebody's willing to explore the cosmos with something far more alien and far more challenging; thus the commission for Nurse With Wound to score a piece for the Melbourne Planetarium's Science In The Dark Series. On the whole, this is a quiet subliminal piece of music with eerie charges of electricity and echoing pools of sustained pure tones, all of which set against low hovering rumbles and deep-gasping drones. Yup, Stapleton (here working with Colin Potter and Andrew Liles) has successfully sutured together the strategies for tonal beauty from his immaculate Soliloquy To Lilith with the very special nothing music of A Missing Sense. While 95 percent of Space Music is cosmic solitude and deep-space floating for Nurse With Wound, the other 5 percent is filled with huge ruptures of exploding noise burst forth during an early interlude of the album, followed by mangled bits of alien speech. Pretty awe-inspiring as with most every Nurse With Wound record. It probably would sound pretty fucking great in a Planetarium, too!
MPEG Stream: "Extract 1"
MPEG Stream: "Extract 2"

NURSE WITH WOUND Spiral Insana (Jnana) cd 14.98