Your Favorite Nurse With Wound Albums

B

beakripped

Mystic
I just happened to notice the lack of discussion regarding Nurse With Wound and since I've been on a bit of a binge I thought I'd try to get one started.

Out of the three groups heading the so-called Esoteric Underground, Nurse With Wound is generally regarded the most difficult. That sums up my experience, since it wasn't until two years after I'd bought my first NWW album (SugarFishDrink, in case anyone cares) that I even began to "get it." The only tracks I appreciated were the middle and latter sections of Creakiness and I Am the Poison - the dark ones, obviously. I didn't give the rest of the album its due fare of attention, mostly because I was already well on my way into a phase of heavy debauchery and lots of Coil. Surprise, surprise, the main reason I checked out NWW in the first place was due to Coil-associations... Surprise, surprise, I later traded SFD for a Coil CD.

(A brief sidetrack) A friend and I had become obsessed with the screeching sound produced by a rusty swingset in a park at the corner of the street where I still live. (The swings are long-gone.) One needn't be intoxicated to appreciate the altered perception induced by the experience of producing those shrieks. Sometimes my friend would sleep over, and we'd go to the park in the middle of the night and swing, laugh, scream... it was the best music ever...

Fast forward two years after I'd bought my first NWW... my friend calls me up from his house, a two hours' drive from me. "You've got to hear this album! You'll get so pissed off!!!"

A few hours later he arrives. I get the pipe ready, he puts the stereo on and... the music emerging from the speakers is almost identical with that produced by the swings. I laugh histarically. "What the fuck is this?" He shows me the cover of Soliloquy for Lilith, explaining, "It's spread over two CDs." "Even better," I reply.

(The reason he thought I'd get pissed off is because we were supposed to record the swings ourselves, but I was pleased to discover someone else had created something of the same nature - and with more abled hands! The reason I state that it was "almost identical..." is because no recorded piece of music could ever recreate the orgasmic feeling of such a sound coursing through one's body in the middle of the night.)

It was a slow uphill battle, but eventually Nurse With Wound became one of my favorite artists (visually too), and my opinion of the music as a whole keeps evolving. Five years ago I would've told you that "All the old stuff is shit," whereas now the old stuff is my favorite. And even though the music has changed so much over the decades there are subtle little things that make a Nurse recording a Nurse recording - such as Stapleton's trademark use of reverb and the overall clarity of his chaoses, matched only by Organum.

My gateway was Soliloquy..., and then Second Pirate Session, SugarFishDrink (again)...

And my favorites are:

Soliloquy for Lilith
Spiral Insana
A Missing Sense
Paraparaparalellagrammatica (w/Cyclobe)
Merzbild Schwet
150 Murderous Passions (w/ Whitehouse)
Second Pirate Session...

... you get the idea.

To anyone interested check out the following links:
brainwashed.com/nww (Official site)
http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/kavenism/nursereviews.html (Review archive)

What's with all the Ss in NWW's titles?
 
I tried getting into NWW in my teens, attempts which failed for the most part. Strangely, I recall enjoying some of the albums I've heard (from sources other than my own record collection,) such as Homotopy to Marie and Soliloquy for Lilith, but I don't think I've listened to any NWW records more than once or twice – I've sold/traded a couple, myself – and I've never felt the inclination to go digging for more. Maybe "enjoying" just isn't the right word; maybe it's fairer to say I found them interesting, like a museum exhibit can be interesting without my having a desire to see it again.

I've given more time to some of the collaborations, such as Crumb Duck (the first one I bought, Stereolab being an extra draw for me, although it's not representative of either band's best efforts) and 150 Murderous Passions (back in my ultra-pretentious "I listen to BDN and Whitehouse" days!)

Incidentally, NWW's Thunder Perfect Mind has some of my all-time favorite sleeve art. (Stapleton is an amazing visual artist, for sure, although I dunno if he did this or someone else...?)

Anyway, I get the feeling this ship has sailed for me... when I was younger, I enjoyed the challenges posed to me by "difficult" or experimental music, but nowadays I would rather listen to ABBA. The real other side of the looking-glass. :roll:
 
It's difficult to say; I really do like NWW, but I cannot pick one choice. I really like Soliloquy for Lilith, but the six tracks are all basically the same loop.

I also like Merzbild Schwet, even if Stapleton himself doesn't like it and I love the eerie "fun" atmosphere of "Alice the Goon".

But I guess "Krokodile Krazy Glue" would be another good choice.

I had an eerie experience with ambient sound similar to yours, beakripped, yesterday, actually. I returned to my Alma Mater, since I'm taking a post-graduate course on Digital and Web design. Anyway someone called me on my cellphone (it was on vibration, I'm not an ass :o ) and I stepped out of the classroom. Once outside I decided to take a quick technical visit to the restroom.

It was very windy yesterday, and to my surprise the wind filtered through the edges of the restroom's door with incredible violence. The effect was very eerie, sounded actually like a constant chorus screaming over a background of noise... think of the chorus heard at the Interval section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Prior to the "Jupiter and beyond the Infinite" section).

What I did, you may be asking yourself? I simply stood there, inches from the door, and started opening and closing it, just a few inches, for various intervals, manipulating the wind’s input. The little exercise took me seven minutes, seven minutes of improvised windy dark ambient... until the cleaning guy violently opened the door and knocked me to the floor. Needless to say, embarrassment endured.

But it was my first piece of ambient music, that's a bonus

Bizarre wind sound can also be heard in the place you can see in my avatar. It's a picture taken from a vantage position from the inside of the hollow "mast" of a bridge we've got here (The bridge itself is a blatant rip off of Calatrava's bridge of Alamillo in Spain, but that's another story). You cannot see it from there, but I took the picture so you cannot perceive which direction both stairs are going.

Anyway, winds filter trough that structure, and you could spend hours listening to the bizarre variations... unfortunately, it is mighty dangerous to step in those dreaded stairs, and the inside is chilly as a thundra
 
Nurse With Wound isn't for everyone, that's for sure.

To Ventriloquist: The cover for TPM is not exactly a Stapleton original. I can't recall the name of the artist or painter... anyway, Stapleton added his own touches to someone else's painting. Same with the cover to the Foxtrot compilation.

To Karnos: I've experienced similar phenomena a few minutes away from my house... there's a cluster of apartment buildings that act as a giant whistle when the wind picks up. Your experience sounds fantastic... I'm kinda jelous.

The most interesting sounds are produced by nature, that is, if one pays attention.

Sometimes I walk home from the bus station
late at night... along the way there's a house with a small garden of reeds in front, near the sidewalk. Recently, on one of my walks home, I took note of the sound that the dead reeds made when the wind made them rub against each other. Naturally I recorded them (a few nights later) and have so far incorporated them into two tracks.

On another topic, my favorite tracks by NWW are those that are so silly they're rendered disturbing. Towards the end of A Missing Sense there's a sample of some goofy disco song... the juxtuposition of that with the cold and minimal electronic humming and muffled voices... it's chilling.
 
Speaking of silly, I remembered another NWW I enjoyed: Sylvie and Babs....

I've also enjoyed doing my own "ambient improvs" as you guys have mentioned. 😉

On a semi-related note, my friend has told me about a book he's reading, which might be of interest to people here: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. Apparently, the author is a music producer who later became a neuroscientist. I don't know much about it or if it's any good, but it sounds intriguing. One factoid my friend passed on to me was that sound is the only sense that leaves an accurate "fingerprint" on the brain. That is, you can theoretically look at a scan of someone's brain waves and reverse engineer the exact sounds they're hearing from that data.

I don't want to get totally off-topic, but also speaking of weird, spooky ambient music (as well as Kubrick movies)... are you guys familiar with The Caretaker? I'm not sure if it's been mentioned on TLO before. Anyway, it's a side project of Jim Kirby of V/Vm fame, and takes its name from The Shining. The first album's title, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, ought to give a good idea of what to expect. I really enjoy this project, and it's reminded me of NWW more than once as I've been listening to it. Probably because it inhabits a gray area between spookiness and absurdity....
 
There's a CD you might be interested in acquiring, Beak... you'll have to forgive me, though, because I forgot the name of the band (a duo actually)... it is one of those bands that under a lack of ideas for names string together a series of unrelated consonants and the end result looks like something out of a bastard Polish dialect.

The CD's name is "Breathing Towers", I heard about it a long time ago. These two guys found in the woods two large hollow brick/concrete (beats me) towers that the woods has started to claim. Since the structures were filled with cracks, the two towers functioned as a couple of naural flutes. The story goes that these two guys were just camping around until they picked the very unusual sound in question; they followed it until they found the structures in the middle of the woods.

Now that I think about it, sounds like a post-industrial fairy tale.
 
Karnos";p="6372 said:
There's a CD you might be interested in acquiring, Beak... you'll have to forgive me, though, because I forgot the name of the band (a duo actually)... it is one of those bands that under a lack of ideas for names string together a series of unrelated consonants and the end result looks like something out of a bastard Polish dialect.

The CD's name is "Breathing Towers", I heard about it a long time ago. These two guys found in the woods two large hollow brick/concrete (beats me) towers that the woods has started to claim. Since the structures were filled with cracks, the two towers functioned as a couple of naural flutes. The story goes that these two guys were just camping around until they picked the very unusual sound in question; they followed it until they found the structures in the middle of the woods.
Now that I think about it, sounds like a post-industrial fairy tale.
Click to expand...
This sounded interesting, so I tracked down the band in question. Apparrently, the band name is simply the main member's surname with a silent "M" affixed to the front.

MNORTHAM - breathing towers
Late one night in 1995, a group of swimmers at a quarry lake on the outskirts of Austin, TX, heard a distant and mysterious sound. They followed it into a nearby field, where they found that the wind was blowing through the open bases of two hollow forty-foot tall towers, creating a natural flute sound on an enormous scale.
A year later, Mnortham returned to this place to record the phenomenon. A microphone was placed on the cement foundation inside the base of each tower. From this vantage, the microphone directly captured the acoustic properties of the internal resonance of the structures. The separate channels capture the shifts of wind currents from side to side, as well as the detailed textures of the surrounding acoustic environment woven within the drifting harmonic clouds.Presented with no effects and minimal equalization, "breathing towers" communicates a delicate beauty of a found composition--a readymade sound space. Since destroyed by growing and suffocating urban sprawl.

01. .[21:38]
recorded - jan 1996 quarry lake austin texas.
mastered - nov 1999 the mizpah portland oregon.

http://preg.org/~mnortham/ontology.htm

Quite curiously, titles such as "Automnal" and "Wormwood" were found. My favorite titles were "Mechanical Compost", "Many Rivers Move Along the Surface of the Magnet", "The Stomach of the Sky" and "The Great and Riverless Ocean". Now I must hear them!
 
I did parallel research with Dr. Bantham and yes, I guess I got Michael Northam's (Mnortham) name mixed up with that of a duo whose band's name looks like a bastard dialect of Polish (Probably To-soo-ah-ah, or whatever that band's name is.

Breathing Towers was limited to a print of 400 copies... fortunately for me a friend happens to have one (he just informed me about it) and I'll probably be listening to it tomorrow, so I'll report back on the experience.
 
On a tangential note, I've always been fascinated with instances of "found poetry." These gems can be encountered anywhere. One's mind and imagination must be receptive, though, lest they be overlooked. An old newspaper with only a portion of the headline still readable, a phrase from a coworker's annoying e-mail, a hand-painted sign along the road advertising the sale of fruits and vegetables. There is goofy poetry whirling and swirling about us at all times. Seize the Cheese or Carpe Fromage. Imagine the possibilities of matching, say, the sound of howling winds with "$ Potatoes 4 sale $" in dripping red paint...
 
I think the whole idea behind Breathing Towers is impossibly cool... and quite fantastical-cum-absurd.

Now, back to Nurse With Wound! My gateway was actually, in itself, SugarFishDrink. I love that album to death. Spiral Insana is a fine album, too. Great music to read Ligotti to before you fall asleep. And believe me, it's hard to get an album that you can actually read to.
 
Well, I finally had the chance of listening to Mnortham's "Breathing Towers", courtesy of a friend of mine who has one of the very limited copies of said album. All I can say is that, Mr. Northam, seeing the unavailability of the CD, you'll have to forgive me, but I had no alternative but to burn me a copy of it... it's that good.

The whole of it is a single 20-something minutes track; it starts faintly and weak, but in no time develops into a raging behemoth of reverberant sound; it's difficult to believe that little to no tampering was made to the original output, other than some slight modifications necessary for the process of digitalizing the sound. "Breathing Towers" reminds me somewhat of "Black Sun" in Boyd Rice's "Children of the Black Sun"; A single note played uninterrupted by a horn growing in intensity, other instruments (strings, drums) start adding up playing the same note until all of it grows into a crescendo... that's what Breathing Towers sounds like, but with nature's own input.

Pretty amazing stuff Michael Northam cooked with this CD.
 
SwansSoilMe/SwansSaveMe";p="6455 said:
The pieces he did with Tibet singing on Octopus.
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Musical Pumpkin Cottage, as it was known in the original version? Excellent stuff. Got that creepy pseudo-jazz vibe that is characteristic of a lot of Stapleton's work, especially with David Tibet.
 
The Insect and Individual Silenced resissue arrivd in my mailbox last week. What a great album! Don't quite understand why Stapleton destroyed the master tapes; he's released plenty of terrible albums, singles and compilation tracks since then.

.
 
beakripped said:
The Insect and Individual Silenced resissue arrivd in my mailbox last week. What a great album! Don't quite understand why Stapleton destroyed the master tapes; he's released plenty of terrible albums, singles and compilation tracks since then.

.
Click to expand...

Perhaps a symbolic gesture to separate his current self from when he moonlighted with Whitehouse (a band I never could take seriously). Then again, he didn't destroy the Merzbild Schwet masters... I think he just isn't fond of that particular album, even just the way it was mixed...
 
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Well...so, let's go for my first post on this very interesting website.
My two favorite albums of NWW are, without hesitation:
1) Soliloquy for Lilith.
2) Homotopy to Mary.
 
There is so much to love about NWW (and Coil, C93), but these are the ones to which I always come back:

Soliloquy for Lilith
Spiral Insana
Thunder Perfect Mind
Salt Marie Celeste

And these collabs:

The Sadness of Things (as Stapleton & Tibet)
Simple Headphone Mind (with Stereolab)
Bright Yellow Moon/Purtle (as NWW & C93)
 
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