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Nurse With Wound/Diarmuid MacDiarmada “Lung Oysters” (United Dairies/Arcana Hibernia, 2025)

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In recent years, the most compelling Nurse With Wound albums tend to be collaborations with other artists and this latest opus reaffirms that trend in impressively decisive fashion. Unsurprisingly, Irish multidisciplinary artist Diarmuid MacDiarmada was previously unknown to me, but his presence certainly seems to have inspired Steven Stapleton to go wild here, as Lung Oysters is exactly the kind of playfully demented party that I always hope for with each fresh NWW release, as fiery psych-rock, kitschy exotica, and surrealist musique concrète all collide in impressively bananas (and surprisingly melodic) fashion. In fact, NWW even sound like an absolutely killer (and explosive) real band here on a couple of pieces. This is the most vibrant and vital new NWW album in ages (or at least since Huffin’ Rag Blues).

Aside from MacDiarmada, Stapleton is joined by a few of the usual suspects (Andrew Liles and irr. app. (ext.)’s Matt Waldron) as well as Irish artist Tara Baoth Mooney (who handles vocals on several pieces). Given that almost everyone involved is some kind of sound collage enthusiast, it is damn near impossible to tell who is doing what at any given point, but I suspect Liles in particular played an outsized role in the opening “Monotony Meltdown,” as he seems like the most likely person in that milieu to unleash a fucking molten guitar solo.

In fact, aside from a brief interlude with some trippy chimes, “Monotony Meltdown” sounds like it could have been recorded by a legit ‘70s psych-rock band like The Groundhogs, as it has a driving beat, a strong bass line, dexterous lead guitar pyrotechnics, tambourines, plenty of wah-wah, and even some era-appropriate organ riff-age. Elsewhere, “Volta’s Pistol” is yet another great psych-rock throwback, as a stomping beat and fuzz bass provide an insistently propulsive backdrop for a dual-guitar melody that would not be out of place on a Mark McGuire album. 

As delightful as it is to hear NWW kick out the jams as a formidable rock band, my favorite pieces tend to be the more exotica-inspired ones. In “The Psychobabbler’s Shroud,” for example, a chanting chorus of vocoder’d voices and metallic percussion provide a breezy tropical backdrop for a gentle melody of harmonics, though the distorted voices certainly add a lysergic sense of unreality to the scene (like someone hired Ak’Chamel as the house band for a laid-back beach resort).

“Two Shoves and a Shunt” is even better still, as the whistling and clattering exotica groove is considerably more vibrant and unpredictable. That rolling and festive jungle party is combined with deadpan, poetic vocals from Baoth Mooney, which makes it one of the more fully formed “songs” on the album, but that part does not last for long, as the final stretch of the piece unexpectedly launches into a cool half-funky/half-proggy groove worthy of classic King Crimson.

The remainder of the album is a bit more abstract, but no less great. The lengthy title piece is especially mesmerizing, as a wandering piano melody weaves its way through a shapeshifting chaos of rhythmic claps, Hawaiian-sounding slide guitar, heaving industrial machinery, snatches of vocal melodies, scrabbling guitar noise, and spoken word that drifts in and out of focus. Elsewhere, the following “Refrain (If I must Die)” resembles an unholy collision of torch-y lounge jazz, the industrial rhythms of Thunder Perfect Mind’s “Cold,” and Crass’s more experimental/abstract side (and features one hell of an intense vocal performance from Baoth Mooney as well). 

At first, I was a bit underwhelmed by the album’s final two tracks simply because they followed such an incredible and unbroken run of hits, but I have since warmed to “Bombing For Peace is Like Fucking For Virginity” a bit. It resembles a fog-shrouded doom metal band endlessly teasing out an extended introduction to their opening song with a hallucinatory sound collage of church bells, ominous ambiance, and a host of sounds that resemble a psychedelic rainforest mingled with a swirl of ghosts. 

It admittedly errs a bit on the side of being too meandering and unfocused at times, but I think Stapleton’s surrealist forebears would have enthusiastically approved of a prolonged build up to a song that never comes. While I have thus far failed to embrace the nightmarish ambiance of the closing “A Hairy Tongue Anomaly (modified),” its worst crime is merely sounding like business-as-usual for late period NWW. That would be perfectly fine by me in a different context, but here it has the misfortune of following at least five pieces that easily rank among NWW’s finest work. Tough break. In any case, I definitely didn’t expect to be blown away by a new Nurse With Wound album this deep into the project’s lifespan, but Lung Oysters is a properly revelatory and surprising release with an unprecedented run of absolute bangers.

Listen here.   

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“Flux Gourmet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” (Ba Da Bing, 2024)

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I acknowledge it is only February right now, but I believe I can confidently state that this soundtrack will be the weirdest and most mystifying new album that I will encounter this year. The film itself was released back in 2022 and follows the trials and tribulations of an imaginary performance art group during a surreal and contentious month-long artist residency. It is an absolutely brilliant and wickedly funny film (possibly director Peter Strickland’s finest work) and joins similarly deranged fare like Holy Mountain in the pantheon of cinema so audaciously batshit crazy that it is hard to fathom how it was ever financed, cast, or released. As befits such a bananas endeavor, the soundtrack features a murderers’ row of compelling artists from the experimental/psych fringes, drawing participants from Broadcast, Nurse With Wound, Stereolab, Neutral Milk Hotel, Swans, and elsewhere. Obviously, that seems like a solid recipe for a unique album, but it is a unique album with a twist, as the heart of it all is Strickland’s own Sonic Catering Band, a shifting collective devoted to transforming the preparation of vegetarian meals into ritualistic noise performances.

The Sonic Catering Band allegedly formed as an anonymous ensemble in 1996 after finding unexpected inspiration in a bout of food poisoning. The band’s mission statement is quite simple (if comically niche): “to employ a similar approach to electronic music as to (vegetarian) food; taking the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a meal and treating them through processing, cutting, mixing and layering. No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish are used and as a commitment to artistic integrity, every dish is consumed by all members of the Band.” The project spawned a record label (Peripheral Conserve) as well, releasing work by many of the folks who appear on the soundtrack as well as some other hard-to-categorize art provocateurs like The Bohman Brothers and Faust’s Jean-Hervé Péron. Unsurprisingly, the project also resulted in some truly memorable-sounding performances (“on the wall by the table hung a lifesize 5ft gingerbread man with headphones on, listening to the sound of himself being cooked.”).

The band portrayed in the film is quite a bit different from the actual Sonic Catering Band, as it is centered on an uncompromising visionary played by actress Fatma Mohamed, but they otherwise mirror the SCB’s quixotic commitment to artistic purity and vegetarian cuisine. Therein lies the big caveat with this album: there is a huge artistic constraint looming over everything, which unavoidably steers much of the music into noise/dark ambient terrain (sizzling, frying, blending, and chopping sounds filtered through chains of effects). There is also a hapless journalist in the milieu whose unrelenting bowel problems provide further scatalogical grist for uncompromising sound art.

In the context of the film, the food-based pieces are quite mesmerizing, but a lot of that appeal is due to the visually striking and ritualistic nature of the performances. As decontextualized sound art, however, brief pieces like “Death Borscht” and “A Pain I Can’t Hold In” feel like teasing excerpts from a killer noise show rather than substantial stand-alone compositions. The album is also strewn with shapeshifting variations of a considerably more melodic Heather Trost piece that serves as the film’s theme (a harpsichord-driven psych-pop confection). Similarly, Roj from Broadcast contributes his own recurring and shapeshifting piece (“Trip To The Shops”) that is roughly in the vein of NWW’s self-perpetuating feedback loop epic Soliloquy For Lilith. The actual NWW piece on the album (“Hindu Monastery Breakfast”) is considerably more nerve-jangling, resembling a rattling tea ceremony hosted by someone plagued with uncontrollable tremors. I am not sure if that necessarily counts as a recommendation, but it certainly made me want to crawl out of my skin in discomfort.

My favorite piece is a solo work by SCB associate Daniel Hayhurst, as his “Monday Service” is an echoing spoken-word fantasia in German over a backdrop of gnarled and heaving sounds that organically form and dissolve in unsettling fashion. I also enjoyed Marta Salogni’s “Cross-Contamination” quite a bit, as she deftly transforms a simple bass pulse into something that feels both seismic and cyberpunk. That said, the album also works quite nicely as a whole for those in search of a sustained fever dream mindfuck, as I listened to it on headphones while blearily wandering through my house in the middle of the night and instantly felt like I had been dropped into a supernaturally tinged nightmare. That is no small achievement for a project that modestly began with little more than a tofu recipe and a mischievous sense of humor. As far as I am concerned, Peter Strickland was already an international treasure as a director alone, but knowing that he can also turn something like a crêpe or a Christmas pudding into a harrowing noise assault makes me love him even more. Hopefully he will continue to find people willing to finance his crazily indulgent whims forever, as the world is sorely lacking in artistic visionaries blessed with such a scathing sense of humor and healthy appreciation for the absurd.

Listen here.

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“Strain Crack & Break: Music From The Nurse With Wound List Volume Two (Germany)” (Finders Keepers, 2021)

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As a longtime Nurse With Wound fan, I have always been a bit amused and perplexed by the almost-religious reverence that people continue to have for Steven Stapleton’s famous list. For one, it is hard to process that there was once a teenager in the ’70s who was so cool that adults all over the world would spend the next forty years trying to replicate his record collection. Secondly, it seems like any underground bands from that era who have managed to remain obscure until now have probably earned that fate for valid reasons, as there have been plenty of blogs and reissue labels tirelessly unearthing and championing freaky sounds since the advent of the internet. 

Given that, I definitely wondered what the hell could still be left undiscovered when this series was first announced. That said, however, the idea of a Stapleton-curated tour of the most outré  and adventurous prog, jazz, and avant-garde artists of the early- and mid-1970s still packs quite a lot of appeal for me, so I am delighted that this better-late-than-never series finally exists. It admittedly took me a while to warm to the previous French volume, as I tend to run screaming from proggy indulgence and unfiltered Dada antics and there was plenty of both in abundance, but there were also some killer underheard gems as well. Unsurprisingly, this stronger second volume features an even higher proportion of such delights, as it is not a mere coincidence that krautrock had a larger and more lingering cultural impact than its French counterpart.

Much like the first volume, this latest one is packed full of unfamiliar names, which is an impressive feat given how deeply fans have mined ’70s German music for killer obscurities. I was, however, vaguely familiar with Wolfgang Dauner and Limpe Fuchs beforehand, probably because they are responsible for some of the album’s most weird and cacophonous moments and that historically tends to be my wheelhouse. Dauner’s piece, for example, sounds like several fusion bands falling down a flight of stairs, while Anima-Sounds’ piece captures a (possibly nude) Fuchs wildly free-drumming and yelping along with a sliding and blurting chaos of homemade instruments. It is easy to see how the latter would have blown some goddamn minds at the time, though it does leave much to be desired in the realm of songcraft. 

The bulk of the album’s other luminaries tend to exist in a gray area where jazz, prog, and psychedelia all blur together into unfamiliar new strains. For example, Association P.C.’s “Scorpion” resembles a Miles Davis-less Bitches Brew session, while the feral-sounding Exmagma call to mind Richard Hell or James Chance fronting King Crimson. Elsewhere, My Solid Ground evokes a baffling collision of This Heat and early Coil with the organ bombast of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. I dearly wish the latter element was absent, but the non-organ passages are right up my alley. 

That said, the most wonderful surprises are the two lengthy jams that close the album. In Thirsty Moon’s “Big City,” a very NWW-sounding percussion motif steadily builds into a heavy rolling groove flavored with subtle elements of sound collage that rivals much of Can’s stronger work. Gomorrha’s “Trauma” is similarly driven by a muscular beat, but instead blossoms into a molten tour de force of spacey psychedelia. Yet another favorite is the hallucinatory marching band mindfuck of erstwhile Neu!/Kraftwerk member Eberhard Kranemann’s “Fritz Müller” guise. The rest of the songs make a compelling and varied suite of inspired oddities, but the Gomorrha, Thirsty Moon, and Fritz Müller pieces all felt revelatory enough to trigger an immediate album-hunting binge. While Steven Stapleton has been one of my favorite artists for ages, it is now properly dawning on me that he is one hell of a great curator as well.

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Nurse With Wound, “Barren” (ICR, 2021)

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This double album had the misfortune of being released near the end of 2020, so it lamentably did not quite get the attention that it deserved (and being a live album probably did not help matters much either). Granted, it has admittedly been a while since the NWW camp dropped an album that I would breathlessly proclaim to be a stone-cold masterpiece, yet the project’s current era features quite a formidable lineup. In fact, most United Dairies/ICR releases in recent years have been refreshingly solid for an entity with such a vast and historically erratic discography. 

Barren happily continues that trend, documenting two performances from differing lineup configurations that have been deemed “amongst their most unusual performances.” In this context, however, “unusual” means “very professional-sounding longform works conspicuously free of sinister whimsy.” Significantly, the two performances are almost unrecognizable as NWW despite cannibalizing a pair of studio releases. They make for quite a satisfying deep-psych/spaced-out ambient release in their own right, however, as there is no rule stating that albums need to be representative to be enjoyable.

On the first disk, Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, and Paul Beauchamp warp and deconstruct “Letter From Topor” & “Eyes Of A Scanning Girl” from [Sic] in a 2012 Florence concert. On the second, Andrew Liles replaced Beauchamp for a 2013 show in Karlsruhe that mangles “Opium Cabaret” from Terms and Conditions May Apply. The two pieces feel like they spring from the same vision, however, and that vision is one quite fond of extremely slow-burning psychotropic drones. More bluntly, that means both halves of this album take a while to catch fire, as it seems like the trio is recording, mixing, and subtly adding new layers in real time (the first disk is even called “Confluence”). As such, Barren demands some patience, as each drone-heavy performance seems to unfold on a supernaturally stretched time scale. 

In fact, Barren feels akin to a deep space ambient album à la Steve Roach’s The Magnificent Void, except there is a dimensional rift and a cacophony of lysergic bird songs, garbled voices, found-sound pile-ups, space crickets, exotic pop songs, and heavy electronic buzzes kept bleeding into the cold emptiness. The more eclectic second disk (“Transfiguration”) is the stronger of the two and “Transfiguration 2” is probably the most stand-out piece on the album, as it follows the faint strains of a ghostly cabaret chanteuse into a shape-shifting mindfuck of smoky noir jazz and wah-wah-drenched desert psych oases. 

Both disks build into sufficiently surreal and vivid crescendos to justify their duration, however, as the overall trend is that each gets better and better as they unfold. Epic length aside, my only other caveat is that the all-enveloping drones dilute too much of NWW’s essence to make this a crucial release by normal Stapleton standards. That said, it is nevertheless a very likable one-off plunge down a deep space rabbit hole, roughly resembling either a Black Stars-era Lustmord remix of a NWW album or its reverse.

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Nurse With Wound, “Trippin’ Musik” (United Dirter, 2020)

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As a longtime NWW fan, the prospect of an ambitious, long-gestating triple LP release entitled Trippin’ Musik naturally filled me with glee and anticipation, as I envisioned another Soliloquy For Lilith-level classic. That enthusiasm remained undampened by the jabbering and splattering loop lunacy of Experimente II: Son of Trippin’ Music, as it seemed like that was intended as more of an outtake collection than a teasing glimpse of what was to come. As it turns out, however, it was very much the latter, as Trippin’ Musik is often an obsessively loop-driven affair that basically expands upon Experimente II rather than transcending it. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trippin’ Musik is occasionally surprising in both its extremity and single-mindedness. This is a bizarre and challenging album even by Nurse With Wound standards.

A strong case could be made that the vinyl version of Trippin’ Musik is the logical culmination of several conceptual threads that have always driven Steven Stapleton’s work, as it combines a lavish visual presentation with a playfully twisted and enigmatic “hall of mirrors” approach to the actual music. It is both an art object and a kind of surrealist game of chance: some songs are weirdly beautiful and immersive, while others are grinding, one-dimensional endurance tests. None of the songs or records are numbered or identified, so the album’s sequence is dictated entirely by the choices of the listener (and those choices will unavoidably be blind ones at first).

The newly issued CD version, on the other hand, offers a significantly altered and enhanced version of the Trippin’ Musik experience, as there are actual song titles and an ostensible sequence. I definitely appreciate the former and I also quite like the digital format, as using the “shuffle” feature enables probability to dictate the sequence rather than my own vague memories of which colored record I liked the most. I also like the clarity of the digital version, as some of the nuance and detail is definitely lost in the omnipresent crackle and hiss of my record player. The differences between the two formats go much deeper than that, however, as the CD version throws in roughly 35 minutes of new material and excises almost half of the material from the pink record (basically 15 minutes of rhythmic metallic scraping that I definitely do not miss at all). Consequently, the CD version is considerably more melodic and listenable than its harsher predecessor.

Notably, one of the new pieces (the 20-minute “Or”) now opens the album, which dramatically transforms its overall feel and trajectory. “Or” does contain some elements of the now-deleted piece from the pink record though, as it eventually locks into a similarly heaving and metallic pulse. However, it is considerably more compelling in other ways, as it undergoes significant transformation over the course of its journey, slowly building from simmering tension and hallucinatory feedback drift into a massive, churning mindfuck.

It is followed by the brief and delightful “The” (plucked from the pink record), which unfolds as warm and bubbling reverie of shivering and shimmering synth-like loops. In classic Stapleton fashion, however, that pleasant interlude ends abruptly to make way for the album’s most relentlessly and obsessively sanity-destroying piece (“Fall”), which mercilessly jabbers in a locked-groove style loop for almost 20 punishing minutes. It basically sounds like a room full of shuddering and puttering old engines, but with an uneasy “squirming” element thrown into the cacophony as well. 

Naturally, that piece ends in jarring and abrupt fashion as well, but it unexpectedly gives way to the surprisingly understated and composed-sounding “Of,” which kind of resembles a German Expressionist Horror twist on jazz. It is a truly inspired and disturbing piece, as it feels like it was once something quite melodic but has since been slowed and stretched into a curdled and reverberant abstraction. It calls to mind an imaginary film noir in which the requisite seductive chanteuse is performing in a smoky nightclub, except that everyone and everything is slowly rotting and melting and all the sounds are smearing queasily together.

The second disk also opens with an entirely new piece (“The”) and it is another interesting one, as it feels like a considerably less disturbing extension of the previous “Of.” Instead of distending and smearing into a phantasmagoric hellscape, however, its foundation of lurching and stammering slow-motion percussion gradually blossoms into a meditative haze of buzzing string drones and gently pulsing, rippling guitar chords. At times, it almost sounds too sun-dappled and benignly psychedelic to be a Nurse With Wound piece, but it also sometimes sounds like a rehearsal tape of Barn Owl/Calexico-style desert rock being played at the wrong speed.

The following “Eye” then makes a triumphant return to the “nightmare jazz” aesthetic of “Of,” which is the aesthetic niche where Trippin’ Musik truly shines. In fact, “Eye” is easily one of the strongest pieces on the album, unfolding as a spacious and heady swirl of flickering, time-stretched female voices and flanged metallic swells. It evokes the sensation of being lured into a hallucinatory forest of swaying metal trees by some kind of half-malevolent/half-seductive forest nymph, which is a stylistic niche that certainly warrants further exploration.

The remaining two songs seem to the ones from the green vinyl, albeit in remixed and altered form. Both are among the finest pieces on the album, though they take very different directions. For example, “OF” essentially unfolds like a complex and multilayered 20-minute loop, but it is a remarkably hypnotic and absorbing one, as snatches of vocals warble and flutter inside a mechanized, churning pulse that is slightly out of phase. The closing “Sound,” on the other hand, actually sounds like the work of a tight, focused, and unexpectedly melodic band. It is quite a lovely piece and is all the more striking for how nuanced, deftly arranged, and purposeful it feels, as it has an actual groove and a lazily burbling and shifting melodic figure. More importantly, it is allowed to run its entire course without being pulled apart, mangled, and dragged into darker, uglier territory.

I would be curious to know what led Stapleton to make the vinyl and CD versions of this album so different, as it genuinely seems like the latter is a punched-up and improved release rather than just the same album with added material thrown in. When I first listened to the vinyl edition, I actually found myself somewhat mystified that this album had taken so long to make, as the pink record just seemed like two abrasive loops stretched out for 20 minutes each. Given Andrew Liles’ extreme work ethic, that seems like something that could have been knocked off in a single afternoon.

Now that the whole album has been rearranged, enhanced, and re-edited, however, Trippin’ Musik feels like a considerably more coherent and focused statement. In fact, I think it could have been one of NWW’s stronger albums if it had been edited even more aggressively than it was, though I imagine the allure of releasing an attention-grabbing triple LP epic was impossible to resist. I certainly was not immune to the appeal of that approach myself and can find plenty to like about both versions of the album. However, Trippin’ Musik could have easily been an album that I absolutely loved if it had been paired down to just “Of,” “Eye,” and “OF” (with “Sound” possibly thrown in as a chaser).

That said, I am about forty years too late if I want to convince Steven Stapleton of the (financially ruinous) merits of being much more selective in what he releases. Embracing imperfection and indulgence is inherently part of being a life-long Nurse With Wound fan, as the occasional rewards are usually worth it. They certainly are in this case, as Trippin’ Musik fitfully shows that Steven Stapleton and his collaborators are just as capable as ever at conjuring up distinctive and radical sound art unlike that of anyone else.

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Nurse With Wound with The James Worse Public Address Method, “The Vursiflenze Mismantler” (United Dairies, 2019)

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It has been a hell of a long time since Nurse With Wound last surfaced with a proper new album on United Dairies, but 2019 is looking to be an uncharacteristically prolific year with the epic Trippin’ Music looming on the horizon. In the meantime, however, there is the endearingly strange The Vursiflenze Mismantler, which pairs Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles with Australian vocal artist James Worse. 

It is very hard to imagine an artist more attuned to NWW’s surrealist whimsy than Worse, as he is best known for his poetry crafted almost entirely from made-up and nonsensical words. Louis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky” is the obvious and unavoidable reference point with Worse’s “Worsicles,” but his poetry only escapes the gleeful mutilations of Stapleton and Liles on one piece here. The rest of the album is a Dada-esque collage of chopped, digitized, and gurgling vocal sounds that occasionally coheres into some unlikely and delightful grooves.

It is not difficult to guess who named the songs on The Vursiflenze Mismantler, as the first piece is entitled “A Thrasm for Pungdust.” Pungdust is quite lucky to get such a fine thrasm in his honor, as it is one of the album’s most endearingly deranged and instantly gratifying pieces. It sort of resembles a remix of “Rock n’ Roll Station” made by a gibbering lunatic, as it has a similar half-stomping/half-lurching beat. The central monologue, however, has been replaced by a lysergic miasma of skittering electronic flourishes and growling, moaning, and whimpering voices. 

The weirdness naturally deepens with the following “Smarch of the Bomberdast,” which is the album’s primary showcase for Worse’s playfully eccentric vision. It begins with some distracted, colorful muttering over deep vocal growls, calling to mind a drunken pirate trying to argue with a disinterested didgeridoo. From those modest beginnings, however, it slowly builds into a dense, howling cacophony of squirming, abused sounds that pan and scuttle across the stereo field. Eventually that wonderfully eruption subsides, making room for more gargling and strangled yelps, yet that jabbering abruptly stops as well and Worse ends the piece with a crisp, mannered recital of one of his Worsicles that sounds downright Shakespearean.

It is nice bit of compositional sleight-of-hand, as it feels like I narrowly escaped some synapse-frying madness to find a perfectly sane and pleasant man reciting his poetry. But the word-like things coming out of his mouth are completely incomprehensible, making me feel like my brain has been well and truly broken (or mismantled) by the song’s roaring crescendo.

Most of the other memorable pieces on the album also appear during its first half, but that is because the warped phantasmagoria of The Virsuflenze Mismantler increasing dissolves into pure texture and abstraction as it unfolds. The fifth piece, “Nana,” is probably the closest thing to a fresh NWW classic on this release, as it is a stuttering and chaotic pile-up of chopped and diced sounds. It feels like a howling nightmare that prominently features a cartoon duck, but then the maelstrom dissipates to make room for a choppy, distorted monologue from a jolly man who has much to say about bananas.

The closing “My Gloadious Parpinelle” is another strong contender though, as the trio are joined by Af Ursin and Aranos for a hauntingly weird twist on classic exotica. The lazy vibraphone melody evokes a tiki bar in a moonlit grotto, but everything else feels deeply wrong with that picture, as there are a host of metallic cranks, odd squeaks, clopping sounds, and menacing drones that curdle and confuse the experience. There are also a couple of excellent “ambient” pieces lurking throughout the album. I especially enjoyed the eerie beauty of “Gwelt Awone On A Sursibass,” in which warm, seesawing drones seem to be emanating from the bottom of a bubbling sea. “The Ockenbloster’s Froascum” is notable as well, as a simmering, crackling, and rumbling soundscape blossoms into an unsettling crescendo featuring a backwards robotic voice.

The rest of the album is not quite as memorable as that handful of highlights, but that is mostly because the second half blurs together in a murky, hallucinatory maelstrom of buzzes, bleeps, roars, and machine noise. While the sounds that the trio conjure up are every bit as inventive, garbled, and disquieting as they are elsewhere, there is a dearth of “hooks” that might make any individual piece stand out from the others. Without a human voice or some kind of melody to latch onto, I am hopelessly adrift in an endlessly shifting sea of chopped up, processed, and disorienting sounds that rarely evolve into anything more.

Admittedly, that is not terrible place to be and I would probably appreciate it much more if this were my first Nurse With Wound experience. That is not the case, so that second half of the album feels like very familiar territory (albeit quite well executed). The flipside to that, however, is that a healthy portion of The Vursiflenze Mismantler feels fresh and inspired. That is quite an impressive feat in a discography as deep as Stapleton’s. Moreoever, this album works quite well as a coherent whole, effectively sinking deeper and deeper into foggier and more elusive realms of madness to pave the way for its resurgent and memorable finale in the form of “My Gloadious Parpinelle.” 

While I would probably categorize The Vursiflenze Mismantler as more of a minor release than a major new statement, it is quite a likable one and the highlights are legitimately wonderful. I suspect this album probably could have been edited down to a near-perfect EP, but only an utter fool would expect Stapleton and Liles to embrace a “less is more” aesthetic this far into the game.

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Nurse With Wound, “The Great Ecstasy of the Basic Corrupt” (Dirter/Jnana, 2016)

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This is a long-awaited CD reissue of a largely unheard 45 RPM art edition LP from 2014. Although the idea of getting a small Steven Stapleton painting with an album was certainly appealing at the time, I was understandably a bit apprehensive about buying an expensive album that could easily turn out to just be a bunch of regurgitated studio scraps or live recordings. I passed. As it turns out, however, The Great Ecstasy was (and is) actually a surprisingly excellent and cohesive album. More importantly, this reissue appends another great rarity to the original release in the form of Silver Bromide‘s “Circles of Confusion,” which is one of my favorite NWW pieces in years. Given that copies of Silver Bromide are currently going for $1500, this humble CD holds an awful lot of appeal.

In classically cryptic Stapleton fashion, The Great Ecstasy of the Basic Corrupt offers no real information other than the track titles, but the line-up is rumored to be just Stapleton and Andrew Liles. I am happy to accept that, as the pieces themselves do not offer much in the way of any further clues: each of these three 20-minute pieces sounds like it could stylistically be the work of a completely different band, though there is an admirable consistency in both mood and pacing that unites them.

The opening “No Meat for the Dogma” is a nice bit of menacing Eastern drone built upon a sinister-sounding two-chord bed of buzzing tambura or sitar. It seems like Liles had an especially prominent role, as the foreground is devoted to a fitfully unfolding and surprisingly musical harpsichord solo that sounds like something an especially sensitive and melancholy vampire might play alone in his castle in one of his darker moods. Since I cannot picture Steven Stapleton ever playing a harpsichord, he presumably focused upon the nightmarish and hallucinatory drone-blossoms that bleed together and undulate in the periphery. It is quite a wonderful piece that would lend itself well to a La Monte Young-style marathon performance (or one of NWW’s own sleep concerts), as it feels like it could endlessly ebb and flow forever without getting boring. 

The other piece from the original album, “Feed the Loathing,” is a bit more minimal and understated at first, but nicely continues the theme of psychotropic droning—in fact, Coil’s Time Machines initially springs to mind as an apt reference point. The piece quickly evolves beyond its foundation of slow, hypnotic pulsing though, adding in some haunted-sounding atmospherics in the form of mysterious creaks, metallic washes and clatters, discordant chimes, and tense swells of “horror movie” synths. Much like “Dogma,” it is not exactly a structured and evolving composition so much as it is a rich, shifting, and evocative tapestry of ominous ambiance, albeit one a bit more intent on conveying an escalating sense of dread. More than anything, “Feed the Loathing” feels like the soundtrack to a paranoid and sleepless night in a remote cabin.

Silver Bromide’s “Circles of Confusion” is a different animal altogether, though it is similarly restrained and slow-burning. The big difference is that “Circles” sounds like the work of a brilliant psych-rock band with seemingly limitless patience. It opens with a loop of a beautifully lilting snarl of feedback that repeats several times before a simple two-note bass line chimes in to mirror it. As with “No Meat for the Dogma,” it is the kind of perfect and elegantly minimal motif that could be hypnotically repeated forever, but even more so. 

Tempting as it may have been, however, Liles and Stapleton did not just leave the piece on autopilot. Rather, they imaginatively embellish their glacially unfolding groove with a bevy of guitar-like noises worthy of Sonic Youth: clattering de-tuned strings, warbling and oscillating overtones, and some unexpectedly poignant swells of feedback. Another big difference is the mood, as “Circles” completely eschews any sense of menace for a sustained reverie of bittersweet and dreamlike beauty. Gradually, it blossoms into a somewhat straightforward and sustain-heavy guitar solo, losing a bit of its brilliantly deconstructionist otherness, but it is still quite an all-around stellar piece.

Obviously, long-time NWW fans are going to pounce on this album regardless of what any reviews say, as both Great Ecstasy and Silver Bromide (along with Xerography) are among the most maddeningly elusive releases in NWW’s entire discography. The good news is that they will definitely not be disappointed at all when they finally hear these pieces for the first time. I know I certainly was not. There are admittedly some other NWW eras that I prefer to this one, but I do very much enjoy what Stapleton and his collaborators have been up to in recent years and this feels like an atypically strong and painstakingly crafted batch of songs. I did not expect that at all for releases that were issued in such small editions. 

In particular, the wonderful “Circles of Confusion” is a revelation, as it does not sound like anything else that I have yet heard from either NWW or Liles. In fact, if it had been recorded by someone like My Bloody Valentine (not an absolutely insane stretch) as an experimental b-side tucked away on some single, it would probably be widely revered as a left-field noise-guitar masterpiece. Thankfully, songs do not have feelings, so it is perfectly fine that “Circles” will instead lead a quiet life as an unexpected gem on an obscure but extremely satisfying NWW reissue.

Listen here.

 

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Nurse With Wound, “Dark Fat” (Dirter/Jnana, 2016)

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I gave up trying to make sense of Nurse With Wound’s sprawling, self-cannibalistic, and absolutely inscrutable discography quite some time ago, but it definitely seems like it has been a very long time since Steven Stapleton has released anything that meets my not-particularly-stringent “this is an actual, legitimate new album” criteria (excellent Graham Bowers collaborations aside, of course). 

Consequently, I was hoping Dark Fat would be the album to end NWW’s long and perversely prolific silence (it was explicitly billed as “long-awaited,” after all). Alas, it is not exactly the bold new artistic statement that I was hoping for. Instead, it is a sprawling collection of “live” recordings ranging from rehearsals to sound checks to actual gigs. Despite its dubious hodge-podge origins, however, Dark Fat actually feels an awful lot like a studio album—quite a damn good one, even. While longtime NWW fans will probably experience many flickers of recognition over the course of these two hours, Stapleton and his collaborators have so thoroughly reshaped and recontextualized everything that it all feels fresh, vibrant, inspired, and appropriately disorienting all over again.

The best way to summarize this album is to say that it feels like Steven Stapleton assembled an entire village-worth of like-minded artists for a very abstract and cavalier traipse through some of NWW’s greatest hits. In a way, I suppose that is exactly what he did, but the twist is that it was a very fitful, slow-motion, and “revolving door” process that spanned six years. In any case, aside from the core group of Stapleton, Colin Potter, Matt Waldron, and Andrew Liles, Dark Fat features a head-spinning roster of avant-garde luminaries in cameo roles ranging from Jacques Berrocal to Stephen O’Malley to James Blackshaw. 

As if that were not enough, it also features some unwitting contributions from Klaus Schulze, Michael Schenker, and Cream’s Jack Bruce (if the roll call during the final untitled track is to be believed). Clearly, even the deceased were clamoring to get in on this party. Naturally, that deranged eclecticism extends to the instrumentation as well, covering everything from Hawaiian guitars to saxophones to cornets to smoke bombs. Given all that, it is unsurprising that Dark Fat is a deliciously difficult album to wrap my head around, as it is massive, freewheeling, and kaleidoscopic in the extreme.

Lamentably, I do not have total recall of NWW’s entire back catalog (does anyone?), so the only real “hit” that jumps out at me is “Rock ‘n Roll Station,” which turns up twice in impressively mangled form. On “Rock n Rolla 1959,” the original groove is transformed by the addition of a laid-back bass line and a bizarre, stream-of-consciousness monologue from Jacques Berrocal. Later, on the untitled album finale, the band reprises the song in more recognizable form, but stretches it out into a lazy 9-minute jam peppered with squalls of wah-wah guitar, hard rock shredding, stage banter, and bouts of extreme noise chaos. 

If any one piece can be said to represent the entirety of Dark Fat in microcosmic form, it is undoubtedly that one, as a recurring theme throughout the album seems to be hallucinatory abstraction coupled with amusing nods to conventional rock tropes. The lion’s share of the album, however, just feels like an amorphous and unpredictably evolving collage of everything NWW does best: ominous ambience, garbled vocal cut-ups, odd juxtapositions, snatches of old exotica records, and a host of electronic blurts and squiggles. 

The sole significant exceptions are “Devil Dreamin'” and “Devil is this the Night,” as Huffin’ Rag Blues vocalist Lynn Jackson returns for a satanic pair of blearily soulful noir-jazz numbers that actually feel like legitimate songs. In addition to being the album’s finest moments, the Jackson pieces highlight yet another recurring theme that pervades this collection, which is inventively recalling the spirit of a previous NWW highlight rather than just explicitly reprising it. Consequently, much of Dark Fat feels simultaneously new and familiar, like hearing some lost outtakes from a favorite album.

Naturally, a two-hour retrospective of soundchecks and rehearsals is going to have some faults, but Dark Fat actually has far fewer flaws than I would have expected. The worst offenses are probably just that a few pieces overstay their welcome and that the band was definitely in a very self-indulgent mood at times. Also, the variations on “Rock ‘n Roll Station” are not nearly as good as the original, though the intent was clearly aimed towards gleefully pulling it apart and détournement rather than something as banal as improvement. 

A far more fascinating subject is how Stapleton inventively makes a virtue of Dark Fat‘s flaws, as this seems like a totally phoned-in album on paper. In reality, however, this eclectic, free-form grab-bag is actually one of the strongest NWW albums in recent memory. It is not definitely not new for high art, low art, homage, surrealist lunacy, impish humor, and just general dicking around to all coexist on a Steven Stapleton album, but it rare for them all to do so quite this effectively and naturally. Dark Fat is essentially an unexpectedly brilliant editing tour de force, masterfully distilling a large part of NWW’s bizarre and wide-ranging legacy into richly textured fever dream of an album.

Listen here.

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Nurse With Wound/Blind Cave Salamander, “Cabbalism I, II, & III” (ICR)

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This is an expanded reissue of a 2012 album that documented two 2009 live performances in which Nurse With Wound, Julia Kent, and Italy’s Blind Cave Salamander teamed up for an improbable variation/reinterpretation of NWW’s classic Soliloquy for Lilith album (an album that was largely the product of an unexpected and unrepeatable electromagnetic phenomenon). The expansion in question is a third performance in an identical vein to the previous two. 

Notably, however, that vein is not all that much like Soliloquy, which makes Cabbalism something separate and singular rather than just a mere live album. In fact, it does not even sound much like NWW at all, which I suppose makes this a very successful collaboration. While the third piece is not nearly divergent enough to warrant repurchasing the album for anyone who pounced on Cabbalism this first time around, the reissue is a very enticing package for those of us who unwisely slept on it.

It is easy to see why this project appealed to Steven Stapleton, as it is a fundamentally absurd and open-ended one. Given that the original Soliloquy was largely the inhuman work of a feedback loop of effects pedals and a helpful magnetic field, anything improvised by a group of musicians armed with guitars, violins, cellos, and a singing saw is inherently destined to be unrecognizably different right from the start. 

The sole apparent common ground between Cabbalism and Soliloquy is merely that there are some electronics making unpredictable sounds and that there is a similarly droning and hallucinatory aesthetic. In fact, the first time that I ever heard Cabbalism (without knowing the backstory), I immediately assumed that Stapleton and Colin Potter were just doing some live processing on a performance by an ethno-ambient drone ensemble. That is not the case at all, but if Stapleton sincerely set out to replicate the stark and alien beauty of Soliloquy, he was quickly buried under too many layers of other stuff to succeed.

In general, all three performances are built upon a low drone that is increasingly embellished with buzzing crests of electronics, swells of feedback, and ominous metallic washes that sound like processed cymbals. Unexpectedly, it is Julia Kent (apparently a member of Blind Cave Salamander at the time) who emerges as the most prominent and distinctive performer, as her mournful cello melodies give each its piece its own shape and feel. As a result, “Cabbalism I”is the strongest piece, as Kent opens up with a darkly melancholy melody and is given plenty of space to make her impact. 

In “Cabbalism II,” she steps forward with an appealingly see-sawing motif, but she rarely lingers in the foreground at all in the new “Cabbalism III.” Notably, however, the third version sounds a lot like the first version might after being sucked through a black hole or something: there are snatches of familiar melody, but they are considerably more subsumed by the simmering electronic chaos around them. That said, while Kent provides much of the structure and most of the album’s “hooks,” it is Paul Beauchamp’s singing saw that seems to be the ensemble’s apparent secret weapon, as the real pay-off for each piece is a passage where Cabbalism unexpectedly blossoms into an understated rapture of lilting, fluttering, and swooping notes. It’s a lot like a fireworks display with no explosions at all, but an unexpectedly slow and beautiful descent of burning embers.

If Cabbalism has any significant flaws, they are highly subjective and mostly related to what it is not. For example, it is not Soliloquy for Lilith Redux nor does it particularly sound recognizably like anything that might have sprung from the mind of Steven Stapleton. Another potential issue is that the new inclusion of “Cabbalism III” does not add much to the album other than increased duration: it is now three very similar variations on a theme rather than just two. 

That should not come as a surprise though: if “Cabbalism III” were a masterpiece, Potter and Stapleton would obviously not have omitted it from the original release. That said, however, the added duration is actually quite welcome, as Cabbalism was already a deep and immersive experience and now it is even deeper and more immersive. As far as I am concerned, much more of a good thing is almost as satisfying as a better album might have been. More importantly, when stripped of any NWW-related expectations and taken solely on its own terms, Cabbalism is quite an excellent drone album: it may not nearly be as gleefully deranged and surrealistic as any of Stapleton’s other recent work, but the consolation prize is that it is still a hell of a lot more complex, unconventional, and unpredictable than most similar fare.

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Nurse With Wound, “The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion” (L.A.Y.L.A.H./United Dairies, 1985)

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After years of hearing about the mythical NWW but never actually hearing them, I finally broke down and ordered this album (then an expensive import) when I was 19. Despite the kitschy title and cover art, I was still completely caught off-guard by the cartoonish and self-indulgently absurd music within and immediately dismissed it as something so dreadful that probably only a Zappa fan could like it (I remember trading it to a used record store for a Carcass album or something later that same week). Many years later, with a somewhat broader mind and some increased context, I decided to give it another chance. I still find it cartoonish and willfully annoying, but it’s also kind of crazily inspired.

The scene that Sylvie & Babs most consistently evokes for me is this: I’m at a somewhat upscale party in the 1960s. I’m dressed (quite suavely) in a tuxedo, sitting at a table in a shadowy corner sipping a martini while watching happy couples dance. About halfway through my drink, the room begins to swirl and the sounds of the party around me begin to warp and bleed together and I realize that I have been poisoned. As I slump from my chair and consciousness ebbs, everything around me becomes increasingly hallucinatory and fractured. As I fade further, my increasingly misfiring synapses begin to trigger all kinds of irrational memories and nonsensical impressions, ranging from chicken commercials to Frank Sinatra to the goddamn “Dragnet” theme. Then it all goes black. End of album.

My original (and current) impression of this album was that Steven Stapleton just cobbled together a bunch of discarded snatches of unrelated recording sessions and unified them after the fact with a previously thought-up fictitious big band concept. The “big band” in this case being The Murray Fontana Orchestra. Given the improbable size of the “orchestra” (almost fifty members, including folks like Edward Ka-Spel, pre-Foetus Jim Thirlwell, and William Bennett), it seems pretty unlikely that the album was pieced together entirely from actual “Sylvie and Babs sessions.” 

More likely, Steven just looked around his studio one day and started incorporating bits of stuff that he liked into his current work from the mountains of tapes surrounding him, both from his own work and from various formal and informal collaborations (cannibalizing 1984’s Nylon Coverin’ Body Smotherin’ EP in particular). Of course, it is fun to imagine that there were actual full-band sessions and that dozens of underground musicians and artists descended on Stapleton’s studio en masse for the explicit purpose of making a surrealist tribute to the Rat Pack era and that he then hacked the resultant recordings into unrecognizable, disjointed oblivion.

Regardless of how it all actually unfolded, the album was originally intended as a perverse collage plundered from samples of much-maligned ‘50s easy listening and exotica. Stapleton spent a lot of time scouring used record stores for raw material, but ultimately wound up using very little of it (though “The Monster Mash” makes a conspicuous appearance). Instead, the inal product seems to be a disorienting mixture of seemingly random samples of commercials and songs, deranged off-key recreations of various standards, anachronistic field recordings (jackhammers, pigs, etc.) and general NWW studio detritus. This is a very much an “everything but the kitchen sink” album: somewhere along the three-year recording process, Steven decided to abandon thematic consistency in favor of just tossing in literally anything that amused him.

Yet somehow it all seems to work: many people have incorporated Dadaist absurdity and surrealist jump-cuts into their music in the 25 years since this album’s release, but no one has quite managed to shape them into such an oddly mesmerizing flow as Stapleton has here. Whether he threw all the elements together randomly, intuitively, or according to the rules of some mischievous surrealist game, it is obvious that Steven cared about the material and sincerely wanted to make a good album rather than mere dumping ground for odds and ends. It must have been an extremely long and frustrating endeavor to hack and sculpt the massive, jumbled mess into something (relatively) coherent using early ‘80s recording technology, but he managed to pull it off to quite an impressive degree.

While a bit primitive and half-baked when compared to more fully realized later works like Soliloquy for Lilith, Sylvie and Babs is nevertheless one of the most memorable, playful, and fascinating albums in the NWW oeuvre (though a decidedly unrepresentative one). The sped-up classical music and “Dragnet” snippets still strike me as a bit stupid and overly slapstick, but they also serve to show a side of NWW that has seldom surfaced since. It may be a bit flabby and unfocused at times, but few (if any) other artists could’ve woven capricious contrarianism, low humor, bad puns, endless non-sequiturs, and chaos into such a satisfying whole.

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