Nurse With Wound

Shipwreck Radio Volume I

Test Pressing/Art Edition

Music - Stapleton/Potter
Painting - Santini
Mastering - Colin Potter
Coordination - Steve Pittis
Layout - Sarah Stapleton

"Between June and July 2004, as guests of Kunst Nordland, NWW broadcast twenty four unexpected radio transmissions from the Arctic Lofoten Islands, five of which are included here."

Thanks to: Anne Hilde Neset & Rob Young, Per Gunnar Tverbakk & Camilla Eeg, Ole Petter Refsedahl, Eivind Furnesvik, Lofotradioen, Mrs Livery, Alzetta & Parthena Kamara, Daniella Cascella, Hans Hagen Stockhausen, Steve Pittis.

Colin Potter, Steven Stapleton

Photography by Hans Hagen Stockhausen
Sleeve notes - Anne Hilde Neset & Rob Young, Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter
Layout and Graphics - Sarah Stapleton
Remastered and Edited by Colin Potter at IC studio, London 2022

I remember Steve calling me from Ireland to say that he'd been approached by Anne Hilde Neset and Rob Young from the Wire Magazine to make a project in the Lofoten Islands, Norway. This was part of a big intrenational arts festival in Svolvaer and would involve staying in the area for a number of weeks, collecting sounds locally and transforming them into two half-hour and one one-hour radio broadcasts, to be transmitted via the local radio station, Lofotoradioen. We would be given an apartment, a car and a small amount of studio equipment. It seemed an excellent opportunity to do something very different to the usual studio-based working method, so it was agreed.

Getting from Preston to the Lofotens proved to be a long and curious process, flying from Manchester to Copnehagen, then to Oslo, the Bodø and finally Svolvaer. Each change involved a smaller and smaller plane, the final one being, I think, a ten-seater propeller job. Quite bumpy. I imagined flying down to a snowy landscape and being taken on a sledge to a smaller village of log cabins, but nothing of the sort. We were picked up at the tiny airport and driven to the small modern port of Svolvaer. The only snow to be seen was in small patches on the surrounding hills and mountains. Our accommodation was the ground floor of a fairly new two-storey house that could have been anywhere. Except as we found out on the first night, it didn't get dark...

It turned out that the festival was quite a big prestigious international thing, with some well-known artists, whose names escape me. For me, it was a bit of a blur for the first few days, meeting lots of people, attending various arts events, looking at various shows all over the town, and setting up our modest studio. Also, liaising with the people from the radio station. We would wander around town or out into the beautiful surrounding countryside, with my trusty DAT machine, recording sounds of the environment or often Steve hitting things. Anything we thought might be interesting. We also recorded some interviews, most notably Ola from the local administration and an English woman from a UK arts organisation, both of whom we felt had amazing voices and appear throughout the final tracks. And seagulls. Fucking seagulls. They were everywhere. So many recordings ruined by their incessant squawking.

We then worked on these "field recordings" to shape them into tracks to be broadcast. We soon realised that producing two hours of content a week was a bit of a task and we managed to negotiate it down to two fifteen-minute and one thirty-minute programmes. These were delivered to the station. I don't think they were very impressed. We wondered what the locals made of this weird shit suddenly appearing on their radios, when they were expecting their most popular programme - Radio Bingo. We got virtually no feedback, which was probably a good thing.

After a few days most of the artists left town and I think we were the only ones remaining, wandering about pointing mikes at extractor fans and whacking metal fences. We also recorded our upstairs neighbours a Namibian family of a mother and two young daughters, who also appear on some of the final tracks. They were refugees accepted by the Norwegian government, who thought it best to send them and several of their fellow countrymen to a small town above the Arctic Circle. The girls were great fun, but their mother often seemed quite melancholy. I wonder why.

We noticed that a few times a week big cruise liners would dock in the harbour and crowds of tourists, doing Norwegian coast cruises would flood into Svolvaer, no doubt excited to escape the confines of the ship. You could see the disappointment on some of their faces when they realised there wasn't much to see & of the few shops in town, only a few were open. But bizarrely one evening I saw someone that I knew walking in the centre. It turned out that she & her husband were on one of the cruises. Not often you bump into someone you know in the Arctic Circle!

All in all, looking back it seems quite a surreal experience, hard to believe it really happened. But we accumulated a huge aount of material and I think we learned a lot about making something out of virtually nothing.

Welcome to Utvaer.
Colin Potter
2025

Unreliable Memories of a Summer in Lofoten

We left the wondrous sound showers, an art installation in Oslo airport, umbrella shaped devices tricking tiny sounds and fragments of Musique Concrète that floated down like musical dandruff as one stood underneath them. We finally boarded a little plane like a converted lawnmower for a bumpy ride to the remote island of Lofoten way up in the Arctic Circle.

The shipwreck radio project was to create music entirely from sounds found in the local environment. Everything on the island was considered a possible audio source and with minimal equipment we started our search for raw material to be processed.

On landing, first impressions: thousands of flapping, gutted cod, strung up and drying in the wind resembling washing lines in a Naples backstreet and with that a hundred thousand frenzied gulls with their relentless, incessant barking which ended up permeating all of our recording attempts.

After we, Colin and I, had settled into our allocated flat in a suburban area on the edge of town we met our neighbours, some wonderful Namibian refugees fleeing persecution in their homeland. The Norwegian government must have thought it a good idea to drop them in this barren wilderness, unremembered. We all had to deal with adapting to 24 hour full summer daylight, which came surprisingly easy, we just learned rather quickly to sleep when tired, to ignore the clocks, never having any idea of the actual time.

We were given food ration tickets and directed to an industrial fish processing plant with a small supply depot, this was to be our fodder provider. I remember seeing a massive slab of Minke whale being cut up. The food options were minimal, packets of dried cod were popular with the locals, when the plastic pouch is pierced, a kind of rancid, putrid decaying fish snack, with a vile stench unlike anything that has assaulted my nostrils, was to be had (and enjoyed!)

To our horror there was no beer! We were offered whale stew on a festival boat trip which tasted like liver, so we were informed.

We wandered about the town with its harbour and factories, boats and tackle searching for sound sources. Colin with his microphone and recording devices, me with sticks and makeshift hammers descending on anything that could make an interesting din. Colin was also the man with the camera, showcasing his unhealthy obsession with car parks and industrial extractor fans, although he'd did manage to get a few good pics.

We were asked to deliver completed compositions to the remote tiny Lofoten radio station for broadcast over a 20 mile radius. These sound bulletins unfortunately began to upset the local fishermen as it was interrupting their 'Radio Bingo' a seemingly very important traditional pastime on the high seas. Things got so intense the Norwegian minister for arts and culture had to defend us by making a statement that we were in fact artists creating sound art and not vandals out to disrupt their seafaring entertainment.

One evening we attended the local music festival 'Codstock' amazingly headlined by the seventies British one hit wonder band 'Smokie' whos biggie was 'Living next door to Alice'. Who would have thought Smokey would be a big hit in the Arctic? This must be one of the places bands go to die, ho hum! The words kettle and black come to mind.

Steven Stapleton
Cooloorta
2025

JANUARY 1432
"...We reached land at almost the fourth hour of night. As we approached, we observed that we were surrounded by underwater skerries; the waves broke against them. There is nothing the seaman fears more than having to lay ashore at night in unfamiliar waters. All our joy and consolation was suddenly turned to deep sorrow and despair, and waiting, we surrendered to our Lord... And the Lord took pity on us and helped us in our peril, for just as the boat hit one of the skerries, a wave arrived which, with one blow, lifted us off the rock, and we escaped unscathed. We edged continually closer to our isalnd of refuge, but nowhere could we find a beach where we could easily come ashore... Then a great miracle occurred: the Lord our Shepherd led us to the only existing beach, and tired and exhausted as migrated birds, we reached the shore..."
This Pietro Querini, a medieval Italian merchant, recorded the moment he and his crew were blown away off course from their intended destination in Flanders. The violent tempest carried them up the North Sea and pitched them onto the southernmost tip of the Lofoten islands, a tring of land shadowing the Northern coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle. As they later learnt, this was the tiny island of Røst, and the islanders - mostly fishermen - were bemused by these finely dressed aliens. Their immediate reaction was to offer help and clothing suitable for a life in temperatures of minus 20 degrees and under. Querini never forgot the hospitality of the people of Røst, and set up trade links in dried cod between Lofoten and Italy that survive to this day.

MAY 2004
Nearly 600 years later, Lofoten was revisited by Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter in a conscious echo of Querini's experience. Bringing no instruments they were left in the tiny fishing village of Svolvær with minimal equipment, and told to get out and make whatever they wanted, sonically, out of their experiences of exploring the islands. The only catch was that three times a week, their work in progress had to be aired on the local radio station, Lofotradioen.
Lofoten never darkens in summer. The air was saturated with the background reek of drying cod, and the headless fish could be seen everywhere, dangling from huge wooden drying racks all over the island. Exploratory walks around the streets of towns like Svolvær , Kabelvåg and Henningsvær revealed strange homemade garden trolls, elves, organic effigies: knotty carved guardians of domesticity that reverberate with a deep rich pagan history.
Every single sound you hear is sourced from environments and objects in Lofoten: buildingd, ships, harbourside tackle, local characters encountered during the period of abandonment on the island. The broadcasts began with relatively untreated material but as the weeks went by, and our poor sailors became more and more hallucinatory, sounds, voices and textures are increasingly distorted, maltreated, mashed into a singular and vivid vision of a community and a place far outside the scope of everyday eyes. Listen for the gulls and terns, squeaking in the background. Or the sound of marching bands and crowds at the local festival, 'Codstock'. The clanging hulls of fishing trawlers and the metallic paraphernalia of a dockside becomes a thundering rhythmic pulse. Voices drifted in and out, from visiting arts officials to Lofoten's more invisible community, like the Namibian refugees Steven and Colin befriended in an apartment on the edge of town.
A memorial to Pietro Querini adorns the crest of a mountain on Sundøya, the neighbouring island to Røst, where his sailors were initially belched up by an unforgiving sea. No such statues for Nurse With Wound - but this music serves as living, breathing, clanging testament to the experience they survived.
Welkommen til Utvær. Welcome to Shipwreck Radio

Anne Hilde Neset, Rob Young
2004