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Nurse With Wound

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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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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 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.