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All Music Guide reviews
The following reviews are taken from the website www.allmusic.com - the copyright belongs to AEC One Stop Group. Please visit the All Music site for more information.
CHANCE ENCOUNTER ON A DISSECTING TABLE:
The debut Nurse with Wound album lies halfway between the more tuneless explorations of Kraut-rock and the new industrialism practiced by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. Across three lengthy tracks, obtuse guitar freakouts are used to frame distorted synthesizers and mostly rhythm-less drum machines. Though it frequently defies easy analysis, Chance Meeting is one of the more glowing examples of uncompromising industrial-noise of the 1970s. John Bush
TO THE QUIET MEN FROM A TINY GIRL:
Following on the footsteps of Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table, To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl was Nurse With Wound's second album and shows the group refining itself from the debut and adding a lot more dynamics. The record starts off with the very short "Umbrella Link," really just some guitar riffing from engineer Nicky Rodgers as a concession for N.W.W. to use his recording studio, before segueing into the side-long "She Alone Hole and Open." Along with the clattering and clanking percussion and weird scraping noises and guitar burbles, French avant-jazz giant Jacques Berrocal joined in on pocket trumpet and Stapleton adds some sax squall for results a bit closer to free jazz than the first record. The side-two piece "Ostranenie" throws a bunch of strange voices into the din, and then later on, a creepy music box takes over. Both pieces have quiet moments that contrast with the noisier sections, and the use of editing is more prevalent, though not as advanced as later releases. Some sections ramble on for too long like a lot of early N.W.W., but it's still an intriguing release, if not as fully realized as later works. Rolf Semprebon
MERZBILD SCHWET:
Nurse With Wound began as a trio, but by Merzbild Schwet, its third album, Steve Stapleton's singular vision took over, with no compromises to other band members. As such it can be considered the first fully realized N.W.W. record and is a far more mature effort than its predecessors, much more focused and sounding less like some stoned guys goofing off in the studio. Stapleton's editing techniques come to the fore, with abrupt transitions, quirky juxtapositions, and lots of strange sounds that would become the hallmark of future N.W.W. releases, even as one album might drastically diverge from the next. The first track (or first side of the original LP), "Futurismo" begins with clanking rhythms, record skip clicks, and horn riffs before veering off into a crazed quilt of women singing, laughing, and talking in French. About halfway through, wild screeches of distortion disrupt the piece, and then more bizarre sounds take over before the piece ends with a collage of over-modulated electronic hum and rambling piano. The other cut, "Dada X," goes further into weirdness with lots of silences, creepy creaking noises, tones that build up and collapse, and scattered spoken word in French and English from Eve Libertine from the political punk band Crass, and the piece certainly lives up to the Dada of its title. Rolf Semprebon
SILVIE AND BABS HI-FI COMPANION:
Proof that the music of Nurse With Wound (aka Steve Stapleton) has never had anything to do with the industrial scene it's all too often associated with (due perhaps almost exclusively to the disturbing bondage graphics on the extraordinary 1979 debut album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella) comes in this hilarious 1985 spoof of 1950s easy listening, which features neither the buxom blonde pinup girls on the album cover nor the "titillating orchestrations of the Murray Fontana Orchestra," but instead Stapleton's hilarious and disconcerting montage of cheesy club organs, Spike Jones, BBC radio comedy punch lines, and assorted coughs, splutters, splats, and wheezes. The booklet accompanying the CD issue on Stapleton's United Dairies imprint features more of the artist's highly original collage work, including a yellowed newspaper cutting relating how he was supposedly apprehended (at the age of 19) in an Oxford Street record shop for opening records and inserting them in the wrong sleeves. Stapleton's mission in life was evidently clear to him back then, and this album is a glorious example of the work of one of music's true originals. Dan Warburton
AUTOMATING VOLUME 1:
Collecting several Nurse With Wound tracks from various compilations from the early to mid-'80s, the Automating albums are a good place to start for someone who doesn't want to jump into the more conceptual releases with longer tracks. Not all the pieces are the same as the compilation tracks, with some being drastically changed. One example, the opening piece on Vol. 1, "Dueling Banjos," is actually two different compilation pieces superimposed on each other with added sounds for something completely new. Clunky military rhythms, noisy squalls of feedback, and a hilarious comedy bit about becoming a registered nurse add up to a strange and memorable cut. The delightfully titled "Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal" is creepier and more jarring, as mutated sax and bizarre female vocals are collaged with crashes of percussion and abrupt juxtapositions. "Nana" and "Ciconia" offer more in the way of weird collage, while "I Was No Longer His Dominant" has spoken word with a minimalist backdrop of slowly shifting drones and silences. "Fashioned to a Device" is probably the weirdest piece among several very strange tracks, with bizarre chanting loops and a background guitar drone that changes textures, while the claustrophobia of the piece builds and builds. All in all, Automating, Vol. 1, like the companion Vol. 2, offers a great selection of material from this unusual artist. Rolf Semprebon
A MISSING SCENE:
This record offers a piece each by experimental artists Nurse With Wound and Organum. The Nurse With Wound track, "A Missing Sense," is sort of a remake of Robert Ashley's "Automatic Writing," and nothing like anything else by the group. When played at low volume, as instructed by the record jacket, one can hardly hear anything except a sporadic click-click noise every few minutes, the other sounds so low in the mix that they get lost. Like the Ashley piece, there are these strange vocal stutters and distant background noises and also some inaudible chanting and movement of metallic objects, as well as organ drones and the blatting of a tuba, and even a pulsing bass rhythm at one point, with everything slowly building but still remaining quite quiet. Much of the sounds get lost in the vinyl, unlike a later reissue of the track on the CD A Missing Scene. The Organum track, "Rasa," which was reissued on CD on the Robot release Organum, Vol. 1, is a bit more dynamic and less ambient, though avoiding the harshness of other early Organum pieces. Drones, scraping noises, and whispery but urgent vocal noises create mesmerizing textures, and this is one of Organum's better works, at once both vital and gripping and spacy and trance-like. Rolf Semprebon
AUTOMATING VOLUME 2:
Like its predecessor, Automating, Vol. 2 gathers up Nurse With Wound tracks from several hard-to-find various-artist compilations, mostly from the mid- to late '80s. One might not think a collection of diverse tracks would be as cohesive as a regular NWW album, but all the material is strong, and with some added studio trickery and even melding two tracks together in the case of "Elderly Man River" and "Dance of Fools," volume two comes together extremely well. "The Strange Play of the Mouth" starts off with a loop of a woman singing, and then after half a minute the electronics kick in to create a surreal sonic collage, even throwing in snatches of show tunes like "My Favorite Things." The NWW take on "Old Man River" goes in a similar direction, as the piece rides on a clunky rhythm while lots of odd sounds rise and fall, ending with the loopy poetry, spoken by Diane Rogerson, on "Dance of Fools." Whereas the first side has similarities to the Sylvia and Babs record, the first track on side two moves in a direction similar to Spiral Insana, with the stabs of organ tones over a constantly changing soundscape, though with a more glacial feel. This is followed by the more spoken-word-oriented "Human Human Human" offering a futuristic vision where pets become food for people, and finally "Lea Tantaaria," based on a painting by insane-asylum inmate Adolf Wolfli. The CD adds as a bonus track "New Dress," another piece with a spoken-word component that also appeared on the NWW/Stereolab CD Crumb Duck. Rolf Semprebon
A SUCKED ORANGE:
The peak of Stapleton's intense art-of-sampling period, A Sucked Orange includes twenty tracks, most consisting of just one repetitive sample gradually reworked over the course of several minutes. Though it's not the most exciting Nurse with Wound release, Stapleton conjures extensive trance-states by relying on just one sound, and that's quite fascinating by itself. John Bush
THUNDER PERFECT MIND:
This album really isn't for all tastes, and those coming to the world of Nurse With Wound from the more popular world of industrial music (α la Ministry or Nine Inch Nails) will find it puzzling at best. Fans of soundscape will find this far more entertaining, with drones punctuated by random staccato busts of percussion, origins uncertain, bleeps, and bloops thrown in for good effect, and the occasional hooting and hollering. The 2001 reissue of the album adds a more coherent and concise remix of opening number "Cold." Oddly, the vinyl version of the album splits the longer pieces onto different sides, so those who prefer continuity will most certainly prefer the CD version. Formal connection: this album is a sister release to Current 93's album of the same name. Sean Carruthers
ALICE THE GOON:
As its liner notes make clear, Alice the Goon is a re-release of a two-song, limited-edition record that was sold at France's Musiques Ultimes Festival in 1995. Depicting a huddled mass of hybrid, degenerating goons, disfigured and distorted by the artist's lacerating strokes and haloed by jumbled lettering, the album's phenomenal cover art is indicative of its contents. The first track provides just the easy listening nightmare its title conjures. What begins with a simple rumba is slowly and meticulously devastated as the predictable repetition is countered by the swelling and evasive noise of distorted guitar squeals and industrial interference. The effect is like watching a dancer under a strobe light; it's not clear whether the apparent unity of the rumba is disrupted by the electronic noise or whether the unity was an illusion from the start. The image on the surface of the disc itself a magic wheel animation of a dancer underscores Stapleton's sonic experimentation with the phi phenomenon on this track. The two tracks that follow, "Prelude to Alice the Goon" and an untitled track that fans have dubbed simply "Alice the Goon," provide a fantastic counterpoint to the repetitive rhythm of the first track; atmospheric noise and spectral vocals wind unpredictably around each other over muffled rhythms. With Alice the Goon, Nurse with Wound offers just under 30 minutes of fascinating music that's no less beautiful for its disturbing experimentation. Rich Goldman
WHO CAN I TURN TO STEREO:
One of the most accessible records Nurse With Wound had done to date, the 1996 release Who Can I Turn to Stereo is still quite a daunting roller-coaster ride down strange and abstract soundscapes, with some weird processed voices thrown in. Perhaps it's made a little easier by a narrator with a soft voice and Italian accent, even if his words, taken from an exquisite corpse from a Nurse With Wound website, are as surreal and nonsensical as the music around them. Or perhaps the fact that the album, while still one continuous collage of sound, is broken down into conventional song-length tracks to make it easier to digest than the usual side-long Nurse With Wound piece. Or the similar hypnotic electro-dance rhythms that crop up on "Yagga Blues," "Space Funk With Springs," "Approaching Darkness Fish," and several other places as well, from a group who is not exactly known for its dance-ability. Maybe it's the lulling nursery rhymes that occur here and there, or the sharper production values. At any rate, it's probably one of the easiest Nurse With Wound records to get into for the uninitiated, even if many old fans revile it for just that same reason. Thankfully, Who Can I Turn to Stereo may be slightly more accessible, but it does not compromise on the strange and surreal musical world that NWW inhabits. Rolf Semprebon
ACTS OF SENSELESS BEAUTY:
This pairing of Nurse With Wound's usual, or rather unusual, sonic collages with the more organic sounds of Aranos' violin gels quite nicely, with neither artist subsuming the other. If anything, like on the best collaborations, they push each other beyond their normal boundaries, and certainly this album is far more playful than previous collaborations involving NWW/Steve Stapleton. Many of the tracks start out in ambient territory, slow tentative explorations of improvisational scrapes and hums. Many of these either build up slowly, or erupt quite suddenly into throbbing avant-rock structures, at which point the violin dances and weaves wildly among the clattering rhythms and other sounds, eventually to slide back into a droning murky dissonance or dreamy flows. Added to this mix are a few sections of heavily processed vocals chanting bizarrely. From the beginning of "Either Open or Unsound" unfurling like the soundtrack to a haunting movie, to the hidden track at the end with dub-rhythms and more crazed vocals, Acts of Senseless Beauty offers a bizarre hallucinatory journey into another musical dimension. Rolf Semprebon
SECOND PIRATE SESSION:
A lot of longtime fans were dismayed by the direction Nurse With Wound went with Rock 'n' Roll Station's clunky electronica rhythms. Then again, N.W.W. was meant to confound its fans, even more so with this Rock 'n' Roll Station Special Edition. Second Pirate Session offers the complete recordings from those sessions, reissuing Rock 'n' Roll Station with a bonus track and another entire CD of music, thus making the original Rock 'n' Roll Station CD obsolete. The additional material is actually quite good, with many of the pieces less robotic and minimal than the Rock 'n' Roll Station tracks. Though there are none of the strange female vocals from Rock 'n' Roll Station, the new material instead offers some wild sax workouts and even some Krautrock-styled guitar. Even a weaker track like the fairly close rendering of a Frank Zappa piece, here titled "Subterranean Zappa Blues," distinguishes itself with some weird sax skronk at the end. Though nothing here gets as chilling as Rock 'n' Roll Station's "Finsbury Park," which re-creates the last moments in the head of blues guitarist Graham Bond before he threw himself in front of a train, pieces like "Chuggin'" and "Ernest Needs a Kidney" manage to create an uneasy dissidence between the beats and the strange sounds. A lot of the extra material is just as good as the stuff that made it on the Rock 'n' Roll Station CD. Like that disc, Second Pirate Session isn't quite as strikingly weird as the best N.W.W., but there are certainly some good moments. Rolf Semprebon
MAN WITH THE WOMAN FACE:
As with any Nurse With Wound record, it's hard to know what to expect, except that it will be something completely out of the ordinary. Man With the Woman Face begins on the ambient side, with lulling drones pulsing in the background, but at the same time particles of rhythm begin skittering around at ten- or 15-second intervals. Other sounds are slowly weaved into the mix, a trio of xylophone tones and some indefinable noises that twitter and flutter, to create a multi-layered mosaic of dreamy and yet discombobulating sound. Surrealism and Dada have always been NWW's strong suit, and this album, like Spiral Insana, is one of the more surreal. The second track, "Ag Canadh Thuds Sa Speir" (which in Gaelic translates roughly as "Up in the Sky, Singing"), is a bit more of a sonic collage with lots of abrupt twists, as ambient drones are disrupted by sporadic bursts of noise. A bomb goes off at one moment, and avant rock with Middle Eastern flare blazes up near the end. The final track begins like the opening piece with the subtle drones and tones, augmented by breathing noises and some vocal samples, and slowly morphs until about a third of the way in, when a remake of the original Amon Duul's "Paramechanical World," with clunky tribal rhythms and flanged vocals, stumbles out of the swirls of hallucinatory clatter and drift. The drumbeat continues through most of the rest of the track, while after a brief creepy organ solo the music becomes even more processed and weird, until finally you're left with just a subtle high drone and a voice muttering the song's title over and over again. Rolf Semprebon
SHE AND ME FALL TOGETHER IN FREE DEATH:
On the cover of this Nurse with Wound LP, She and Me Fall Together in Free Death, a sad-looking teddy bear stares at us through wire netting. It's a striking image for a striking title, but the music itself offers a comfortable blend of Krautrock and sound experiments. Side one is filled by "She and Me Fall Together Like Free Death." A solid slab of experimental rock, with the emphasis on the second term; the piece will please fans of Can, Faust, Neu! and, yes, even Nurse with Wound. It has been given a solid backbeat and spacy guitars. As a bonus, it overcomes its stay just long enough for you to wonder what Steve Stapleton had in mind. Side two continues in the same "easier" vein with a cover of Patty Waters' "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair." It's interesting to hear Stapleton sing, but his rendition barely makes it to the knee of the original avant-jazz tour-de-force: Waters' vocalizing was downright scary. In the last two pieces, the music makes a hard left turn. "Chicken Concrete" is an attempt at musique concrete in the barnyard. We hear clucking and rustling (real sounds treated to sound false, or false ones treated to sound real?) in this clever but very odd composition. And for the sex cravers among you, "Gusset Typing" offers an erotic monologue read by a high-pitched robotic voice over a soundscape of keyboard patches and moaning girls. Considering how Nurse with Wound has tackled strange eroticism in the past, this attempt is surprisingly weak. A bit disappointing, this album still has enough good moments to make it worthwhile to fans. Since it is a bit hard to find, newcomers should start with a more substantial album. Franηois Couture
SALT MARIE CELESTE:
Salt Marie Celeste has just one long track that begins with a whisper of sound that ever so slowly builds even as it remains quite ambient. The underlying track was issued earlier on a rare Current 93/Nurse With Wound double CD called "Horse Hospital", and consists of an ambient, ultra-minimalist tape loop drone with a sound that rises and falls but otherwise doesn't change during its hour length. The original release didn't have much to it, and was no match for an earlier Nurse With Wound release in the same vein, Soliloquy for Lilith. On Salt Marie Celeste, other noises are very gradually introduced to the underlying drone and repeated at regular intervals. First, there's a whizzing sound that was also used on Man With the Woman Face, then a one-second high-pitched tone that almost sounds like a distant ship's horn calling for help in the mist, and later on, creaking noises that earlier appeared on a Nurse With Wound track titled "Creakiness." Then comes a low, clattering noise a bit like thunder and then eventually, other clattering noises. The creaks have a back and forth movement like the wooden masts on a listing vessel, and with all the other elements thrown in, one gets an eerie sense of doom, as if the ship was slowly sinking, whereas the earlier recording suggested the never-ending waves of an implacable ocean. Towards the end of the track (album), the sounds fall away and we are left again with the original minimalist drone ebbing and surging for another five minutes before slowly fading away. It's one of the bands' more ambient ventures, borrowing bits from several other albums to make something completely different. Not quite their best but certainly a nice listen, and a big improvement over the earlier version. Rolf Semprebon
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