Nurse With Wound

2024 Stock. Deluxe 2 CD reissue. Remastered with a bonus cd of outtakes from the sessions. Originally released in 1996, the original album has been expanded to include the complete Stereo Wastelands CD, which was a very limited release and is now out of print. Also included is the single edit of Yagga Blues and the previously unreleased track Eternity. The double digipak features newly designed artwork by Steven Stapleton!

It has much in common with Krautrock (yes, again!), particularly the tape editing (Can, Faust), as well as the modulation and splice experiments of 20th century classical avant-guardists (Stockhausen, Henri, Cage etc.). But these are just touch points, rather than starting blocks. This music has something deranged about it (like The Residents), but it’s very listenable and not nearly as hard work as I’m probably making it sound (unlike (much of) The Residents.). Synthetic rhythms pitter patter as weird and wonderful noises, often with no immediately apparent source, jump in and out. A surrealist narrative in a gorgeous brown voice with a Spanish accent drops in now and then to give us the impression that a story is unfolding. Each track flows into the next giving the whole album a ‘concept’ feel. The ‘concept’, however is of our own making, as any themes are too oblique to be a concrete concept. Hell, the concept is the NWW sound, not any bash-you-round-the-head-till-you-get-it lyricism. This record is bloody difficult to describe. Mainly because I’m scrabbling around for reference points, but this music sounds like the product of a hermetically sealed environment and a singular aesthetic. Effects are used, not merely as aural colouring-in but for a purpose. If this sounds like serious stuff, then I’m also misleading you, because there are large doses of dark humour here too. I probably also haven’t got across the beautiful nature of much of this record. ‘Yagga Blues’ is a sumptuous piece of exotica. Oh, and moments of genius like using the sampled words ‘…to communicate’ looped, as a mantra rhythm-track just make the hairs on my arms stand up! (Head Heritage)