It's frustrating that one of the best Nurse With Wound albums in recent years will probably slip through the cracks of formatting politics. Available to purchase only as a bonus vinyl LP with a pre-order of all three collaborative albums, Raw Material-Zero Mix may not be heard by many people. Although it was merely meant to provide source material to be reworked by Jim O'Rourke, Cyclobe and Irr.App.(Ext.), this album should have been released on its own. Rather than sounding like a library of sounds and skeletons of ideas to be fleshed out by other artists, this sounds like a finished, fully formed statement. "Part One" is a side-long exploration of the interplay between various creaking sounds and a steady blanket of drones. This piece recalls one aspect of their recent work, particularly the slowly developing atmospheric moods created with "Beware the African Mosquito (Ring Your Doorbell, Put You to Sleep)" from 2002's Man With the Woman Face and 2003's Salt Marie Celeste. "Part Two" is in sharp contrast to "Part One's" exercise in understatement and tension building, as it embeds the same creaking sounds in a panoramic landscape. This section's nightmarish blasts of sonic detritus are an aural representation of the Hell panel from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Toward the end of the piece the sounds of saxophone, flute and hand drums played by members of Xhol Caravan are introduced. These acoustic sounds don't sound out of place among the electronics that have so far domimnated the album. Between these untreated acoustic sounds, the quiet tones and creaking ratchet sounds in "Part One" and the chaotic shards of noise in "Part Two," Nurse With Wound has provided an impressive range of source material. Although Cyclobe's take on this material is a widely divergent escape into their outer-space freakout zone, O'Rourke and Irr.App.(Ext.) have seemingly done little to further the ideas presented by Stapleton and Potter. It may have been more exciting if the project were taken in the direction of actual collaborations between Nurse With Wound and each of these three artists, who are all good choices for such a task. All of these Angry Eelectric Finger LPs feature excellent design work, which is a step in the right direction for Beta-lactam Ring, whose past releases have often looked amateurish with regard to layout. It's a shame that this album was not given proper release status. Hopefully a CD reissue is in the works, as it would give a proper perspective to the efforts of O'Rourke, Cyclobe and Irr.App.(Ext.).

Jim Siegel