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

NURSE WITH WOUND Stereo Wastelands (Beta-Lactam Ring) cd 26.00
"A collection of musical debris from the original Who Can I Turn To Stereo session" is all that Beta-Lactam provides in terms of information about this album. Along with Rock 'N' Roll Station released a few years earlier, the 1996 album Who Can I Turn To Stereo could be seen as one of the few gateway albums into the hermetic sonic realm of Nurse With Wound. While NWW's Steven Stapleton has made no bones about the albums that have influenced his project (and in many ways, the Nurse With Wound LIST of influences which was included in the first album has become a collector's checklist of terminally out-there kosmiche rock and psychedelic electronics), the combination of those influences have defined one of the most singularly unique voices in all of music history. So when it comes to a NWW album with 'crossover appeal,' don't expect Stapleton to make it easy on the ears. Who Can I Turn To Stereo found Stapleton deeply mired in his infatuation with bizarre exotica records and the mambo sounds of Perez Prado; and the three lengthy cuts of "debris" from those sessions are thoroughly abstracted variations that occasionally ground themselves upon a bongo loop which had developed into a signature for NWW throughout the '90s. The tracks weave with eerie smoke and dopplereffected shadow. Jittery rhythms co-habitate alongside the bongo loops and march on one occasion with a jagged guitar whose spindly sounds harken all the way back to the NWW album A Chance Meeting Between An Umbrella And a Sewing Machine. Sadly, the original version of Who Can I Turn To Stereo is no longer in print; and it has to be said that the original mixes probably work better than what you'll find here, although Nurse With Wound outtakes still sound pretty damn great no matter how you slice it.
MPEG Stream: "Stereo Wastelands 1"
MPEG Stream: "Stereo Wastelands 3"

NURSE WITH WOUND Sugar Fish Drink (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.

NURSE WITH WOUND Surveillance Lounge (United Dirter) cd 19.98
A frightening record. Even by the standards set by the darkened mind of Steven Stapleton, the Surveillance Lounge is a terrifying album in fact. This set of recordings began through a 2007 commission by the F.W. Murnau Foundation to provide a live soundtrack for the 1922 Murnau film Der Brennende Acker ("The Burning Soil"). A silent film that was thought to be lost until 1978, it tells a tale of a man who grew up in the rural life but cut himself from that existence through greed, lust, and ambition, rife with moral and psychological dilemmas. Nurse With Wound is no stranger to the art of the homage, having constructed the ultra-minimalist masterpiece A Missing Sense under the influence of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing and the two Echoe Poem discs drew inspiration from the French New Wave film Last Year At Marienbad. The sessions, which gave us The Surveillance Lounge, came out of the initial material used for that soundtrack and were completed during the ensuing years. The bulk of those sessions actually had been encapsulated in a super limited edition box-set called The Memory Surface, which may be out of print by now, if not impossible to track down. That said, the Surveillance Lounge represents the best of this material, which was produced by Stapleton and Andrew Liles with vocal support from David Tibet, Freek Kinkelaar, and a host of others.
Moaning vocals and creepy whisperings set a darkened hue for the Surveillance Lounge, which also adopts a chilling set of piano notes that seem to allude to another soundtrack, Coil's rejected score to Hellraiser. Soon afterwards, a textured smearing of sand, earth, and rock conjoin to a deep wooden creaking that ominously lurch forward in a similar manner to the epochal NWW album Salt Marie Celeste. The use of vocal snippets - in French, in German, from David Tibet, of children wailing - are signature moves from Stapleton, and are used in some of the best collage material that Stapleton has generated since Homotopy To Marie. Vocal and textural elements always seem to collapse into darkened shadows, only to find Stapleton and Liles forcing another scream of noise, voice, and electronics to the foreground with jarring effect. For the central track "The Golden Age Of Telekinesis," NWW slowly build a shuffling rhythm out of the shards of broken glass that intensifies through the development of a screeching noise buttressed by the rapid-fire glossolalia of what sounds like an auctioneer. Expect to find a dynamic chasm between the relative quiet of the early moments of this track to the ear-splitting crescendo of a tape machine whirling out of control. As the album draws near to a close, NWW explode land mines of noise, scorched earth, and Tibet's screams in barren soundscapes of disembodied voices and shadowy drones. By contrast the album ends on a note of soft-hued easy listening muzak with its politely swaggering guitar, which is creepy given the context of its cancerous segue. Like we said, frightening! This might be a good entree to NWW for those of you who normally only by black metal or ultradoom albums...
MPEG Stream: "Close To You"
MPEG Stream: "The Golden Age Of Telekinesis"
MPEG Stream: "Yon Assassin Is My Equal"

NURSE WITH WOUND Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion (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 The Bacteria Magnet (Dirter) lp 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

NURSE WITH WOUND The Musty Odour Of Pierced Rectums (A Collection Of Obsolete Primitive Variations) (Beta-Lactam Ring) lp 26.00
"A Collection of Obsolete Primitive Variations" reads the subtitle to this lp from Nurse With Wound. Beta-Lactam had issued this in 2003 as a cd-r in an edition of 300 copies to coincide with Stapleton's DJ appearance in Portland, Oregon at around the same time. Of course, those cd-r's disappeared rather quickly; and this vinyl edition of 500 won't last long either. Given Steven Stapleton's history with recycled sounds, it's hard to say if this is a collection of outtakes like the recent Rat Tapes Volume 1 or if this is one variation on a theme extended over the course of the album. In any case, Stapleton's mastery of audio techniques through metallic clank, musique concrete razor cuts, and grim psychedelic smoke & mirror is on full display here with plenty of fizzed noise and electrical drone cast in sidereal shivers and electrical delirium.

NURSE WITH WOUND The Swinging Reflective: Favorite Moments of Mutual Ecstasy (United Dairies) 2cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Nurse With Wound's catalogue is a daunting venture. And if you aren't sure where to start, this double cd of collaborations offers an exceptional sampling of the wide variety of sonic adventures that Steven Stapleton could take you. The Nurse With Wound aesthetic is primarily a dadaist assault of musique concrete techniques within a weird, often dark, often psychedelic context of mutant pop.
The star studded collaborators including Stereolab (whose contributions here are "Animal or Vegetable" off 'Crumb Duck' and one of the "Simple Headphone Mind" tracks), Chrystal Belle Scrodd (Diana Rogerson performing an excellent kraut-groove), Coil (a remix by Stapleton of their ritualistic "How To Destroy Angels"), Foetus (as Jim Thirwell and Stapleton cover the lysergic funk of Brainticket), Tiny Tim (yes, Tiny Tim!!!), Legendary Pink Dots, William Bennett (of Whitehouse on a very early track before the two parted on bad terms in the early '80s), Current 93 / David Tibet (both Stapleton and Tibet have worked extensively together for the past two decades), Aranos, Tony Wakeford (of Sol Invictus), Chris Wallis, and Peat Bog. Windy gives this a solid recommendation for all (like her) who haven't known where to start.

NURSE WITH WOUND Thunder Perfect Mind (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.
Nurse With Wound's 1992 companion album to Current 93's of the same name. Beautiful, darkly shimmering soundscapes as assembled by Steven Stapleton and co. [among them David Tibet (Current 93), Colin Potter, Rose Mc Dowell (Death In June), Anita Plank, John Balance (Coil)]. At times deeply hypnotic, at others tensely unsettling like a tiny jackhammer on an even tinier toy piano. Stunning.

NURSE WITH WOUND Thunder Perfect Mind (Drag City) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Any Nurse With Wound release on vinyl is most highly coveted. Always with gorgeous artwork to match the sonic artistry within. So this release is a welcome -- albeit mysterious -- vinyl re-issue by Streamline via Drag City of Nurse With Wound's 1992 companion album to Current 93's of the same name. Beautiful, darkly shimmering soundscapes as assembled by Steven Stapleton and co. [among them David Tibet (Current 93), Colin Potter, Rose Mc Dowell (Death In June), Anita Plank, John Balance (Coil)]. At times deeply hypnotic, at others tensely unsettling like a tiny jackhammer on an even tinier toy piano. Stunning.

NURSE WITH WOUND Two Shaves And A Shine Remix Project (United Jnana) cd 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
"Two Shaves And A Shine" is one of those rare 'songs' penned by the lysergically inclinded Steven Stapleton, originally found on the Nurse With Wound album An Awkward Pause. The track's got a rolling bassline that would have made King Crimson very happy back in the day, a frantic backbeat supplying a spry rhythm, sparkplug guitar stutter, David Tibet screaching in rapidfire fashion, and all of those fucked-up Nurse With Wound idiosyncracies that make the track a distinctly Nurse With Wound track.
A few years ago, Stapleton discovered that somebody had created a mash-up of this track with James Chance's "Contort Yourself" (or was it the James Black redux?), and out of this discovery came the idea for a NWW remix competition, with the best tracks to be released on a CD on Stapleton's United Dairies imprint. Well here's the result. We can't say that any of these bands are well known projects, with the Bay Area entries from Xambuca and Forms Of Things Unknown being the only ones we even recognize. Not surprisingly, it's a pretty diverse compendium of deliberate weirdness, Beefheart theatricality, and cranky audio collages, all of which are connected by the insistent bassline of the original tune. The highlights are the blurred shoegazing drone of Pepe Wismeer, Xambuca's human beat box grooves which brings Tones On Tail's "Slender Fungus" to mind, and the scattered fun-house collage of Coil-esque electronica and squiggled noise from Lithopedion. Other contributers include The Stomach Aches, James Hill, BB, Anemone in Toto, Balog, dell.tree, the Vivian Girls, Horst Jankowski's 21st Century Swingers, Crab Fisher, and Nelson Ford Templeton.
MPEG Stream: THE STOMACH ACHES "Two Shaves And A Shine"
MPEG Stream: PEPE WISMEER "Two Shaves And A Shine"
MPEG Stream: LITHOPEDIAN "Two Shaves And A Shine"

NURSE WITH WOUND Who Can I Turn To Stereo (United Jhana) 2cd 17.98
There was a time when all of the Nurse With Wound records were available all at the same time, although this feat was the work of the much scorned World Serpent label, who screwed over pretty much every artist on their roster and pressed up a bunch of cds that were susceptible to bit rot. So, even if those records were in fact around, they were in many cases unlistenable. Who Can I Turn To Stereo was spared the bit rot, but didn't fair well otherwise. This came out in 1996, marking one of the first collaborations that NWW maestro Steven Stapleton conducted with Colin Potter. Along with Rock 'N' Roll Station released a few years earlier, the 1996 album Who Can I Turn To Stereo could be seen as one of the few gateway albums into the hermetic sonic realm of Nurse With Wound. While Stapleton has made no bones about the albums that have influenced his project (and in many ways, the Nurse With Wound LIST of influences which was included in the first album has become a collector's checklist of terminally out-there kosmiche rock and psychedelic electronics), the combination of those influences have defined one of the most singularly unique voices in all of music history. So when it comes to a NWW album with 'crossover appeal,' don't expect Stapleton to make it easy on the ears. Who Can I Turn To Stereo found Stapleton deeply mired in his infatuation with bizarre exotica records and the mambo sounds of Perez Prado, resulting in a long-form collage of hypnotic rhythms interlaced within a rollercoaster of seasick electrical squiggling, haunted ballroom motifs (some 10 years before Kirby was doing it), and spectral vocalizations.
This 2011 reissue is coupled with Stereo Wastelands - "a collection of musical debris from the original Who Can I Turn To Stereo session." The three lengthy cuts of "debris" from those sessions are thoroughly abstracted variations that occasionally ground themselves upon a bongo loop which had developed into a signature for NWW throughout the '90s. The tracks weave with eerie smoke and dopplereffected shadow. Jittery rhythms co-habitate alongside those bongo loops and march on one occasion with a jagged guitar whose spindly sounds harken all the way back to the NWW album A Chance Meeting Between An Umbrella And a Sewing Machine. Oh, there's a bonus track, "Eternity", not found on the original!
Very nice to see this material back in stock once again, and as mentioned, this would make for a very good place to jump into the wild and wonderful world of Nurse With Wound.
MPEG Stream: "Yagga Blues"
MPEG Stream: "Livin' Fear Of James Last"
MPEG Stream: "Stereo Wastelands 1"
MPEG Stream: "Stereo Wastelands 3"

NURSE WITH WOUND & BLIND CAVE SALAMANDER Cabbalism (Dirter Promotions) lp 31.00

NURSE WITH WOUND & GRAHAM BOWERS Rupture (United Dirter) cd 19.98
Graham Bowers is a name that you may have heard floating around in the mid '90s, perhaps by way of some choice reviews in The Wire. While the nature of those recordings escapes us, he claims an eclectic heritage of avant-garde practices that might gravitate towards the Chris Cutler side of progressive composition. In the smattering of interviews we've read, he comes off like a perpetual outsider with no interest in participating in any particular 'scene' of experimental music. Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) met Bowers while both participated in a 2011 sound-art festival in Wales; the two then embarked on an ambitious collaborative project resulting in this unnerving, post-classical album attempting to articulate the inner workings of a human brain that had suffered a stroke and that has only a little over hour before death.
The dominant 'voice' within Rupture is a cacophonous collage built upon orchestral samples, fixated mostly on bombastic horns and kettledrum crashes. While the origins of the sampling is unclear, Bowers and Stapleton make little attempt to obfuscate the sampled technology, with the symphonic samples played through the keyboard, discordant and portentous. Amidst these orchestral blurts, quintessential slashes and enigmatic drones indicate Stapleton's signature sound design, with warbling ballroom vocals from Victrola recordings, amplified heartbeats, and unanswered telephones ringing. The album's entire mood is one of panic that steadily fades to black, and hardly qualifies as easy listening.
MPEG Stream: "A Life As It Now Is"
MPEG Stream: "And Never Will Be Again"

NURSE WITH WOUND & GRAHAM BOWERS Rupture (Dirter Promotions) 2lp 31.00
Now, on vinyl, for Record Store Day we were told, though they only just showed up...
Graham Bowers is a name that you may have heard floating around in the mid '90s, perhaps by way of some choice reviews in The Wire. While the nature of those recordings escapes us, he claims an eclectic heritage of avant-garde practices that might gravitate towards the Chris Cutler side of progressive composition. In the smattering of interviews we've read, he comes off like a perpetual outsider with no interest in participating in any particular 'scene' of experimental music. Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) met Bowers while both participated in a 2011 sound-art festival in Wales; the two then embarked on an ambitious collaborative project resulting in this unnerving, post-classical album attempting to articulate the inner workings of a human brain that had suffered a stroke and that has only a little over hour before death.
The dominant 'voice' within Rupture is a cacophonous collage built upon orchestral samples, fixated mostly on bombastic horns and kettledrum crashes. While the origins of the sampling is unclear, Bowers and Stapleton make little attempt to obfuscate the sampled technology, with the symphonic samples played through the keyboard, discordant and portentous. Amidst these orchestral blurts, quintessential slashes and enigmatic drones indicate Stapleton's signature sound design, with warbling ballroom vocals from Victrola recordings, amplified heartbeats, and unanswered telephones ringing. The album's entire mood is one of panic that steadily fades to black, and hardly qualifies as easy listening.
MPEG Stream: "A Life As It Now Is"
MPEG Stream: "And Never Will Be Again"

NURSE WITH WOUND & WHITEHOUSE 150 Murderous Passions (United Dairies / RRRecords) cassette 6.98
Now, a limited time, we have this classic recording on cassette! It is a little unfortunate that we've never reviewed this album, although it has graced the aQuarius shelves from time to time. 150 Murderous Passions sometimes designates the name of the 'band' and sometimes, it's the name of the album penned by Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound) and William Bennett (aka Whitehouse) in 1981. Regardless of how anybody wants to qualify the album, there are two distinct variations on these recordings, with both producers offering up their own take on the original source material. Bennett scoffed that the version Stapleton produced lacks the in-the-red intensity he envisioned for the album; and to be blunt, Bennett is totally fucking wrong. Stapleton (who published his through his own United Dairies, with Bennett's getting a Come Productions make-over) definitely offers the superior version, with Bennett -- despite all of his infamy in the late 70s and early '80s -- really not coming into his own until some five or six years afterwards. Yes, power electronics do require some finesse. But that's not to say this is a walk in the park for a Nurse With Wound album; there's plenty of atonal metal screeches, echolocation rhythmic patterns of klanging noise, stabs of feedback, and unholy screams which get collaged into a very claustrophobic, demented composition. Anyway, all of the other versions of these recordings are totally out of print, with their future reissue probability being a big question mark. So, if you don't have this awesome album already, get the tape. Now.
MPEG Stream: "150 Murderous Passions"