Nurse With Wound Primer (taken from The Wire)
The Nurse With Wound Primer by David Keenan appeared in 'The Wire', Issue 221 (July 2002). I transcribe extracts from it here without permission, so this posting may have to be deleted if the legal team from 'The Wire' come knocking on my (virtual) door...
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NURSE WITH WOUND
CHANCE MEETING ON A DISSECTING TABLE OF A SEWING MACHINE AND AN UMBRELLA
(UNITED DAIRIES UD001 CD 1979)
Even before he had a group who could use it, Steven Stapleton first secured himself some cheap studio time through his job as a signwriter and graphic designer. He was working at the British Marketing Service's studio in Wardour Street, Central London, when he got talking to the in-house engineer, Nicky Rogers. If he ever felt like "making some noise", Rogers offered, he should give him a shout. Claiming that his group were ready, Stapleton convinced Rogers to book them in on the next weekend. He quickly prodded his aforementioned friends John Fothergill and Heman Pathak into buying some instruments for them to record. Fothergill got an electric guitar with a treble booster and a ring modulator, Pathak picked up an old keyboard, and Stapleton brought along a box of toys, tools and electronic devices. "There were no roles, none of us had even picked up an instrument before," Stapleton remembers. "We didn't even do a practice. John had only got his guitar about four days before the session but I remember him saying, 'God, it's amazing, it's so easy!' We set up and after a 30 second run-through we just went for it with no idea how long it was going to be or what form it would take. It just grew as we did it, mostly live with very little overdubs."
Fothergill's haphazardly prepared guitar embedded barbed shards in Stapleton's conveyor-belt electronics, while Heman unfurled a drone from his heavy, Teutonic-sounding synth. Part of the studio deal included allowing Rogers to let loose on guitar. His proto-Metal lead work might sound incongruous on the first track, "Two Mock Projections" - "It sounds like @#%$ Santana", groans Stapleton now - but just such bizarre juxtapositions, thrown together by chance, would later play a major part in Stapleton's surreal armoury. "The Six Buttons Of Sex Appeal" moves further out, with Fothergill's guitar mining the kind of forked vectors pioneered by Derek Bailey. This early on, they're still sounding out the extremes of their various record collections - the gravity-defying fug of early AMM, the Industrial klang of Kluster, the hallucinatory euphoria of The Mothers Of Invention - yet the music is already very much their own.
Convinced that there would be no audience for Chance Meeting..., Stapleton came up with an attention-grabbing cover featuring some heavy S&M drawings lifted from the front of a porno mag called Latex And Leather Special. The group's name, meanwhile, was coined by Fothergill's mother. "The name Nurse With Wound came from my mother," he explains. "She picked it out of a list of words that I had drawn up. 'Nurse' and 'Wound' were on the list through my passion for Francis Bacon and his painting of a screaming woman after the scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, where a nurse is wounded in the eye on the Odessa steps."
They sold all 500 copies in three weeks. Also included with Chance Meeting... was the notorious 'Nurse List'. Essentially an A to Z indexing the inspirational core of their combined record collections, it still gets the most obsessive of record collectors scratching their heads. Their checklist of 'electric experimental music' runs the gamut of comparatively mainstream entries like Captain Beefheart and Yoko Ono, through obscurities like Keith Tippett's Ovary Lodge, Swedish Zappa-philes Samla Mammas Manna and American destructo-punks Debris. Stapleton maintains that some of the groups were invented, but Fothergill absolutely refutes the assertion. Well, the French group Fille Qui Mousse never had a record out at the time the list was compiled - an archive CD has just been released - otherwise Fothergill appears to be right. But chances are that nobody outside Nurse With Wound has actually heard them all.
Edited by: indarknessletmedwell at: 4/8/04 3:09 am
NURSE WITH WOUND
HOMOTOPY TO MARIE
(UNITED DAIRIES UD013 CD 1982)
Stapleton has always considered 1982's Homotopy To Marie his first 'real' record. Here's where he first discovered editing and worked out how to shape its dynamics. Around about this time he block-booked a studio every Friday night for the entire year. From 6pm to midnight, Fridays, he religiously went down to the studio almost as a way of unwinding from his job. Any money not spent on food or bills was ploughed into recording time. "That was the happiest time I ever had in the studio," he smiles. "It was great fun, every week I'd have different people down and it was just fantastic. Homotopy To Marie just came out of all that."
With its cover art depicting a disembowelled doll tumbling into blackness, Homotopy To Marie is a uniquely disturbing record. Less conventionally 'musical' than its predecessors, Stapleton's jumpcuts set up some chilling juxtapositions. Children's voices float through the fog while gongs and metal percussion curdle the air. His use of silence is also highly unnerving, especially when it is usurped by distant groans and long, arching drones. A rigorous logic guides Stapleton's arrangements. Sometimes he structures parts around correspondences based on the slightest timbral similarity; elsewhere he triggers chains of musical events with a single word or half-heard sound. Stapleton describes it as "automating", a term he lifted from Twiggs Jamesons 1968 novel Billy And Betty (used as a euphemism for masturbating), while also giving the nod to the spontaneous automatic writing technique pioneered by surrealist André Breton.
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