ICR presents the first vinyl release of Shipwreck Radio Volume One, Nurse With Wound's monumental documentation of their 2004 residency in the Arctic Lofoten Islands, Norway. This deluxe three-disc box set features spot varnish detailing, a full-colour insert with original photographs, and newly written reflections from Steven Stapleton. The audio has been meticulously remastered for vinyl by Colin Potter.
Between June and July 2004, as guests of Kunst I Nordland, Nurse With Wound broadcast twenty-four unexpected radio transmissions from the fishing village of Svolvær in the remote Lofoten archipelago, off the coast of Norway. The project was instigated by Anne Hilde Neset, Rob Young of The Wire magazine, and Kunst I Nordland, an organization committed to bringing contemporary art to the county of Nordland. Each broadcast was preceded by a jingle: a male voice saying "Velkommen Til Utvær" followed by a female voice translating "Welcome To Utvær," Utvær being the most remote island in Lofoten, with no permanent inhabitants.
Stapleton and Potter were commissioned to produce three radio broadcasts per week for local station Lofotradioen, constructing music from whatever they heard or could find around the islands. The duo created transmissions of either 15 or 30 minutes duration, building sonic structures from environmental recordings, found objects, voices, marching bands at local festivals, the clanging hulls of fishing trawlers, metallic dockside paraphernalia, and conversations with Namibian refugees they befriended. These raw materials were processed, looped, stretched, and transformed into what one listener described as their very favorite Nurse With Wound album.
The broadcasts began with relatively untreated material but as the weeks progressed, sounds became increasingly distorted, creating what critics have called a hallucinatory vision of a community far outside everyday experience. The isolation evokes The Residents' Eskimo, but with none of the whimsy: this is sound exploration that trudges into cold and dark, aware it may never return to civilization.
Reviewers have noted how the work exploits environmental noises and subtle processing to create textural expanses of beautifully chilling ambience, with pieces sounding like orchestras succumbing to hypothermia, stretching chords to epic lengths as audio detritus pans through stereo channels. The album grows darker, more menacing, more sluggish as it progresses, perhaps reflecting the fatigue of working in a hostile environment where the sun shines nearly 24 hours each day. There's an organic, impromptu feel lending the music an immediacy not usually found in Nurse With Wound's typically painstaking studio processes. Potter's droning influence is particularly strong, creating what has been described as a freeform travelogue or audio diary. The music evokes the haunted world of dead mariners, sunken ships, and impossibly dark caverns. This is dark ambient at its most immersive and unsettling: transmissions from beneath consciousness, electromagnetic signals warped by water pressure and time, the slow dissolution of human presence into pure atmosphere.
