We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Nurse With Wound's contributing pianist (Sylvie and Babs, Spiral Insana, A Sucked Orange, and a number of compilation and odd tracks) gave up recording as Sema by the late 1980s and continued on through the '90s under different guises and aliases to suit quite a different style of music he pursued. This is the first release in nearly 20 years under his own name and finds a return to the quiet and introspective simplicity that fans of the quiet piano era will easily adore.
Written on Water consists of eight compositions which unsurprisingly center around piano. The package, in Crouton style, is stylish and atypical, completed with a care and aesthetic to design and presentation: the sleeve is letterpressed and delicately folded with a printed image framed and inserted on the cover. (It's also a hand-numbered edition of only 500.) The variety of each piece suggest to me that these recordings have been collected over a number of years with different ideas and goals in mind. There is something for a lot of different fans of styles however I'm hesitant to say this is a collection which will find the majority of people loving all of.
It opens deceptively with a very Philip Glass school of minimalism composition, the abrasive and rhythmic "Over Land." What follows are tunes which are far more peaceful, introspective, and almost personal sounding. A captivating tune like "Interior Device" wouldn't sound out of place on the United Dairies LP Valentine Out of Season, an album which, after years, I'm still anxious to hear restored from the original master tapes and issued on CD for the first time. The gorgeous "Persistence of Memory" and "New Harmony" sound to me like the most logical evolutionary step from this style, as the arrangement is sparse and each embraces a number of pauses while introducing very few treated sounds to accompany the piano at the forefront. The scale, tonality, and effects on "Persistence of Memory" are reminiscent of some of Harold Budd's works but it clearly is not a copycat piece, as repeated motifs suggest more that it is in touch with a mid 20th century piano style of Erik Satie. In between "Interior Device" and "Persistence of Memory" are two significantly more multitracked but completely different recordings. The title tune is a serene, moody, and cinematic piece while "Ein Form" is a song with abstract loops and counterpoint: here the piano dances with synthetic wind and percussive melodic instrument sounds. Its theme returns with slight alterations as "Eight Form" later on the disc.
Closing the album is the beautiful "Orbits" and an intoxicating unlisted ninth track (only on the physical release), the first of which echoes back to the pastoral sound of songs like "Interior Device," while the last bit almost comes full circle to "Over Land" with its repetitiveness, however it is not nearly as abrasive as the album opener.
I hope this is album is only the beginning of a reintroduction of Robert Haigh, stripped clean of the mechanicalism of his '90s output. While bloggers and bit torrenters enthusiastically share the solo and Sema recordings, I have found the quality to be absolutely dreadful, so with any luck the originals can be located and re-emerge soon as well.
Almost 23 years after his death, Robbie Basho's cosmic approach to steel-string guitar is the stuff of legend. On this 1980 live recording, Basho's exciting and perplexing playing is sometimes punctuated by his delightfully unfashionable and extraordinarily full-throttle singing.
While often mentioned in the same breath as John Fahey and Leo Kottke, it’s possible to draw a line connecting Robbie Basho back to Blind Willie McTell and Ravi Shankar, and forward to Sir Richard Bishop, Steffen-Basho-Junghans, Matt Valentine, Jack Rose, and James Blackshaw. In that sense Basho is an important link back to the country blues past and to myriad tunings and styles from across the globe.
Robbie Robinson went to a military school, then did pre-med, lacrosse, weightlifting, sang in choirs, and played trumpet. In his embrace of individualism and creative freedom, he bought an old Mexican 12 string, wrote poetry, painted, and took the name Basho in honor of haiku poet Matsuo Basho. Blues, folk, and classical European modes were studied but his raga style emerged after hearing Shankar’s early 1960s sitar records. Basho used open C and more exotic tuningsand he developed an esoteric doctrine for 12- and 6-string guitar, concerned with color and mood. He spoke of “Zen-Buddhist-Cowboy songs” a long time before Gram Parsons mentioned his vision of Cosmic American music.
Basho made several albums for Fahey’s Takoma label, and was similarly interested in using the guitar as a formal concert instrument. His humor and graciousness are often lost amid accusations of an overly-reverential approach and the fire in his playing unfairly ignored due to his later association with the Wyndham Hill label. Before his death Basho continued to expand his compositional and harmonic ideas into classical scores. He wrote “a Sufi symphony” and another for piano and orchestra about the Spanish and Christian cultures coming to America.
As the liner notes reveal, Bonn ist Supreme has been polished up from a second-generation cassette tape and the original source master tapes are missing, possibly destroyed. Even so there is enough clarity and a wild resounding joyfulness to be heard here on such tracks as “Rocky Mountain Raga,” “Easter,” and “The Grail and the Lotus.” I find “German Chocolate Cake” as strange and unsatisfying as the dessert itself (note that this track has been recorded elsewhere as “Ackerman Special”). Amongst the other offerings are “Fandango” and “Silky Jane,” two pieces that Basho may have never recorded in the studio. Also, “Cathedrals et Fleur de Lis” is a fine rendition of the track which originally appeared in 1969 on Basho’s Venus in Cancer album.
The latest from Zagreb's instrumental rockers Seven That Spells is a marked improvement over their previous collaboration with Acid Mother Kawabata Makoto. While that album certainly wasn't bad, its main fault was that it sounded too much like any other Makoto project. Here, however, their energy and prowess are on full display.
What sets the band apart from other instrumental psych groups, besides their occasional synth, is their use of the saxophone, particularly on songs like "Ra" and "Lo III." Its playing is alternately soaring or frenetic, complementing the music perfectly and giving it a unique identity. Although all of the musicians are uniformly excellent, drummer Bruno Motik in particular stands out on tracks such as "Lo III" and "Daktari." His unconventional style brings a welcome urgency to these songs.
Unlike the work of some other instrumental groups, there is never a sense that these songs are lacking vocals. Their ever-evolving arrangements provide all the entertainment they need. The band goes from whirring electronics to tribal beats to straight-ahead rock to ear-shattering freakouts with ease. They are always full of surprises, even ending the album's finale, "Tearjerker," with an airy, palette-cleansing guitar cloud.
The flipside of the CD is a DVD of one of the band's live performances. While generally the bonus material that supplements an album tends to be of average or sub-par quality, this concert footage is actually pretty good. It doesn't waste time with any artsy gimmicks and shows the band under decent lighting, capturing their music with good sound quality. The songs themselves don't stray too far from how they sound on the album proper, but that's only a minor complaint. Since I'm not sure if I'll ever have the chance to see them live, it's nice to have this footage.
There seems to be a dearth of quality rock these days, but Black Om Rising goes a long way toward proving that wrong. Lacking any fashionable pretensions, the group simply lets their music speak for itself in all of its dazzling glory.
On the surface, the second album from Poni Hoax seems to have it all: brooding synthesizers, punchy drums, a dispassionate yet forceful singer, and an icy attitude. While it contains several good songs and some decent hooks, it's not enough to override the album's overbearing mood or its sections of needless repetition.
One of the album's biggest flaws is that too many of these songs are far longer than necessary. The band seems unable to pare down these songs to their essential elements, and the result is a bunch of otherwise enjoyable tracks that end up overstaying their welcome. The opener "The Paper Bride" is a perfect example of this. The intro builds tension for almost two minutes, which is almost a minute and a half longer than necessary. After the vocals have finished, it then continues with little variation for two more minutes, making what could have been a sharp three or four minute pop song into a nearly seven-minute epic. This is a formula that similarly buries and ruins pop gems like "Antibodies" and "Crash-Pad Driver." Also dooming the album is the nearly fourteen-minute-long ambient closer "Faces in the Water" that seems like mere tacked-on filler. It's completely out of place and adds nothing to the album overall.
The album's stand-out track is "The Bird Is on Fire," the only song that was able to maintain my interest from beginning to end. It has a discernible structure that goes through natural changes as it progresses, heightening its enjoyment at every turn. There are also a couple of near misses, like "Pretty Tall Girls" and "All Things Burn," but they're not enough to save this album.
Attitude reigns supreme here at the expense of content. Besides being too long, there are simply too many other bands doing music like this much more successfully to make Images of Sigrid linger for long in the memory.
Don't trust photographs because they're nowhere near as powerful as genuine memories. That may as well be Fleet Foxes motto for their debut record on Sub Pop. At least there's one band that believes their music should be more than the guitars, drums, and voices that compose it.
The liner notes for Fleet Foxes' self-titled album are simple and function as something of a manifesto: music, more than any other artistic medium, is a chance for someone or a whole group of people to perform a magic trick. Ask anyone who loves music and they'll tell you that certain albums and songs remind them of particular places and people; loved ones who may now be gone, good and bad times, or particular evenings spent driving for the sake of wanderlust all somehow take sustenance from the songs that accompanied them. The trick is that the memories enhanced by the music come to life more readily and with more force than memories triggered in any other way. So when this quintet begins their album with "Red Squirrel, Sun Rises," it is little wonder that the immediate sensation is one of time travel: the band takes its audience backwards, both musically and metaphorically, in order to stir up the soul still barely clinging to pop music.
Comparisons to folk, country, and bluegrass have littered descriptions of this band. All such descriptions are a failure on the part of the writer to acknowledge the depth and breadth of which pop music is capable. Yes, there are fiddles, mandolins, flutes, acoustic guitars, and other distinctly American instruments on each of these 11 songs, but suggesting that this band is thus writing one pop-rock-country hybrid after another is as simple-minded as calling your best friend Allen Ginsberg because he's gay and has a notebook filled with poetry lying around somewhere. The truth of the matter is that Fleet Foxes has more in common with The Byrds, Jason Molina, Will Oldham, and My Morning Jacket than Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, or Bob Wills. Fleet Foxes evocative nature is a result of their superb song-writing, simple but massive arrangements, and Robin Pecknold's nearly flawless voice. With that in mind it is fair to say that many of these songs have a pastoral quality. The often simplistic melodies and strummed guitars harmonize perfectly with Pecknold's colorful lyrics about marching through the snow, the strength of family, the desperation that accompanies death, and escapism. None of them veer off into that no-mans-land of personal confession and half-hidden anger. Pecknold confronts each of his topics with delicacy and an understanding that directness is not always the best route to capturing the audience's imagination.
Nevertheless, there are moments where the music becomes dramatic and all the great human emotions burst forth. The soul of the music is only partially in Pecknold's voice; the entire band is capable of erupting with unrestrained energy and then suddenly backing off to allow for a deep breath or a precious moment of silence. The epic rise and fall of "Your Protector" and the rambling "Ragged Wood" reveal a band so refined and in touch with each other that I'm often left wondering if the songs were actually written or if they somehow spontaneously came into existence. The natural ebb and flow of some of these songs make them feel pre-destined somehow. And all the vocal harmonies that the band is capable of only enhance my image of them as very careful, calculating musicians. Yet, the music is organic and natural, the product of the mind and the soul. These musicians genuinely believe that what they're making as a group has some power, something beyond trite, stylistic aping and nostalgia. In short, Fleet Foxes has recorded the best album I have heard this year. They have come to the studio with a purpose and have succeeded in suffusing their record with it. If only other bands could remember why they love rock and pop music, too.
Created from the minds of four Germans who seem to have a penchant for wrapping themselves from head to foot in bandages, Monokrom manages to produce a monstrous and gargantuan ‘industrial’ sonic juggernaut intent on flattening everything in sight. One Fine Day in the Pyramid is the latest testament from this noisy lot, full of clanks, scrapings, scratchings, and full-on mechanical mayhem.
As a preface to this review, I have to make two observations here. The first one, which is fairly minor, is that knowing the kind of material that I have so far encountered on Ant-Zen, this was absolutely not what I was expecting. Secondly, the phrase ‘industrial music’ gets bandied about too much and very often bears little resemblance to what the genre originally started out as. This album of eight songs truly is industrial in construction and atmosphere, mixing elements of annihilatory noise combined with machine rhythms. If you imagine a collision of The Grey Wolves, early Test Department, and any number of rhythmic industrial acts, then you have an inkling of what One Fine Day in the Pyramid contains.
It is very much an album of two distinct styles, crunchy robotic rhythm pieces sandwiched in between large slabs of noise. Despite liking the album in totality, I prefer the rhythmic episodes more than I did the pure noisiness. Perhaps that was because I have been subjecting myself to a great deal too much noise lately. The album introduces itself with a great swathe of slowly building noise interlaced with insectoid voice on opener “Fushshklork” (and no, none of the other song titles make much sense either), eventually segueing into the stomper “Faglork.” Employing chunky layers of interweaving syncopated steam-punk beats, this Marilyn Manson-esque track barrels along relentlessly, almost steamrollering the distorted vocal line in the process.
“Wiz Ga-wiz,” another footstomper, follows hard on the heels of the cacophonous maelstrom of “Pop-Sproing-Ging.” “Wiz-Ga-wiz" is the standout track for me here, a perfect amalgam of noise, samples, robotic syncopation, and acidic vocals. If ever there were a dance-floor filler this is it—its jet engine-propelled urgency had me bouncing in my seat and tapping out the rhythm on my desk. Drill-bit squeals and screeches lent spice and garnish to this creation. Similar machine-gun aesthetics prevail on the pithily-titled “Ka-chunk,” which does exactly what it says on the box in between the sonic assault. “Wunk” closes out the album, clashing percussive metallicity underpinning granular noise speckles and rasping voice.
The mix of the two styles helped to create a broad palette, which in turn allows a broad textural spectrum of sonic paintings to emerge. The rust and decay of long-gone industry is there, as well as a reminder of what once was. Even the cold unthinking and unfeeling machines had a semblance of life in their heyday. Somehow, Monokrom have distilled the essences of both aspects to produce a mechanical homunculus that perfectly synthesizes them. Plus, pervading all is the personification of the dictum that from out of chaos emerges order. One Fine Day in the Pyramid shows what a good job Monokrom did of putting all the pieces together.
One of those albums that fits Load’s usual style, this is a disc of punk-damaged goofy thrash that obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously, and even through the cacophony some element of melody does rear its head through the muck.
The tracks on Torture Footage stick to a rather similar formula that is this disc’s greatest shortcoming. With only two of the tracks clocking in at over three minutes, most consist of a blasting drum and distorted bass rhythm, with abused guitar banging and vocals that, for all their indecipherability, often propel a sense of melody in the songs. The overall sound is a sort of Dead Milkmen meets Lightening Bolt, without specifically sounding like either of the two bands.
Because of their short duration, the tracks never get into a point where repetition becomes a problem. The tracks are quick to adapt their structure and pacing and bounce back and forth between a couple similar, though different styles in each track. Tracks like “Air and Water” and “Priscilla’s Bleach Bath” stick to this basic noisy formula with some concessions to melody from the vocals. However, “I Am Ze Doctor” and “Trick Boots” are a bit less dense and more mellow than the others, even though I’m speaking only in relative terms. Any other band this would be a sloppy mess, but here, this is a bit of opium during the meth binge.
Perhaps it’s just a similar feeling to a Rorshach test, but some things begin to arise from the chaos, such as the rockabilly elements of “Hell is Ahead” and “Mini Harpyes” that are there amongst the noise, or at least that’s what I hear. The former’s sound, mixed with the dual male and female vocals bring it more to a bizarre world where the B-52’s are doing Napalm Death covers.
As I’ve alluded to, the biggest problem with this album are that, for all intents and purposes, it could be a single 30 minute track, because there is just such an element of sameness from track to track. It’s not an unheard of problem, and personally, I have problems sitting through full albums from the Ramones and early Swans for the same reasons. Picking a track or two here and there makes for better listening experience rather than trying to sit through the entire album at once, in which ones attention tends to wander. In short bursts, it’s a fun set of chaotic instrument abuse that mixes the noise and melody quite well.
In his second release to date this year, Justin Broadrick has created something completely different from his previous two splits (with Eluvium and Envy), and two tracks that stand out as different in his entire discography. On the other half, Battle of Mice provide their own brand of emo-influenced post metal that simply doesn't seem to go well with the Jesu material (or vice versa).
The two tracks from Jesu on here are as far away from the synth heavy post-punk influenced pieces that he created on both prior split releases. Instead of the complex heavily layered and multi-tracked material the project has become synonymous with, here it is stripped down, Spartan, and extremely subtle. “Clear Stream” is based entirely on plucked guitar notes, piano, and slow, simple drum programming. The vocals are heavily vocoded and low in the mix. This will probably satisfy those people who aren’t fond of Broadrick’s singing, which some criticize as being amateurish and detracting, but personally I have always enjoyed it, and I feel it usually meshes with the rest of the track well and wish it was a bit less effected on here.
“Falling From Grace” is similar, though somewhat more traditional Jesu with the more distorted riffs, but still moving along at a sluggish pace and dominated by piano in the mix. The vocals are more up front, but it still maintains the simpler arrangement of “Clear Stream.” As a whole, the feeling isn’t far removed from Earth’s recent (post-Hex) output in its pace and simplicity, but there is also a similar sound to the hidden track on the final Godflesh album Hymns, which was a teaser as to what Jesu would become.
The two contributions by Battle of Mice actually seem out of place next to the Jesu material, being much louder and aggressive in comparison. In general, I’m not a big fan of the unabashedly hard rock sound here, and the alternating over-enunciated female vocals mixed with emo screaming don’t inspire much for me. Both “The Bishop” and “Yellow and Black.” The latter fares a bit better with some more interesting atmospheric elements here and there, but again is overshadowed by the overly conventional metal riffing and emo vocals. While I admittedly am not usually a fan of female vocals, the two extremes presented here: overly feminine “soft” vocals and hysterical screaming have never worked for me, and I feel no different here.
As a whole, this just feels like an odd combination. Considering some of the most sparse, gentlest Jesu material is on here, putting it back to back with more metallic and aggressive Battle of Mice stuff just seems odd. The previous Jesu splits with Eluvium and Envy worked because they both showed the other band’s penchants for atmospherics and shoegaze influenced rock, respectively. Here it’s an odd combination that doesn’t seem to sit well. The Jesu material is different, but still great (though for this year I’m preferring the stuff on the Envy split) and Battle of Mice would probably sit better with someone who’s a bigger metal fan than I.
United Jnana presents a tasteful and well-executed digipak CD reissue of vintage Nurse With Wound material that hasn't been available in unaltered form since its original release on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords back in 1983.
We've needed this for quite a while. Gyllensköld was a Nurse With Wound release that had never been particularly well-served by the early 1990s transition of the back catalog to CD. Instead of getting a straight CD reissue of the vinyl tracks, all fans had was the 1993 World Serpent disc entitled Large Ladies With Cake in the Oven, which contained the foreshortened, reworked versions of the tracks from the 1989 Gyllenskold/Brained LP along with a bunch of other odds and ends from various compilations and releases. All that seemed to unite the various pieces on Large Ladies was the fact that Clint Ruin AKA Jim Thirlwell/Foetus probably had a hand in most of the material included. Other than that, it was a largely illogical and annoying collection of mismatched odds and sods. That's why it's nice to have all of the original Gyllensköld vinyl back in print, in un-remixed versions. For completists, United Jnana has included the three reworked versions from Large Ladies as well, at the end of the CD so as not to disturb the original sequence. Now this is how it should be done.
This period in which Gyllensköld was recorded was a fantastic time for the evolution of Steven Stapleton's audio art. His collaborations with Diana Rogerson, Robert Haigh (Sema), David Tibet, and Thirlwell around this time elicited some of the most exciting work Nurse With Wound had yet recorded. Listen to this material and compare it to Chance Meeting and it becomes clear that in just a few years, Stapleton's art had grown by leaps and bounds. The production quality on these tracks is remarkable, and the widening out of the NWW soundworld opened up a whole new audio toybox that Stapleton has continued to experiment with up to today. This new sound encompasses vocal experiments, vintage LPs of easy listening music, demented nursery rhymes, lateral references to disposable pop music, avant-garde jazz and minimalistic piano composition, all glued together with evocative atmospheres redolent of things unholy, troubling and perverse, but always oddly indefinable and puzzlingly misshapen. In retrospect, Gyllensköld can be seen as the beginning of the "mature" period of NWW, and thus it is an indispensible release for fans of the project.
Perhaps influenced by the obsessions of his friend and collaborator Tibet, Stapleton also began weaving religious and occult references into his usual name-dropping of avant-garde artists and movements. The title of Gyllensköld was taken from an entry in dramatist August Strindberg's Occult Diary, a volume which represents either the record of a great writer's exploration of magic and mysticism, or the hallucinogenic scrawlings of a man in the grips of extreme paranoid psychosis, depending on your point of view. Similarly, NWW's Gyllensköld comes across at times as the soundtrack to a schizoid episode: disembodied voices intoning nonsense, floating subliminally across the stereo channels, or cackling in evil delight. The sounds are denser here than on earlier works such as Homotopy To Marie. Areas of silence are mostly gone, replaced by layers of drone, cartoonish noises and mutated voices. "Several Odd Moments Prior to Lunch" opens the brief album, setting the stage with its lysergically altered vocals and a frightening, yawning chasm of haunted, spectral sound. Stapleton, Thirlwell, and company learned how to wield the studio like an instrument on these and other recordings of the period. Effects such as reverb, delay, ring modulation and backwards tracking are utilized to create evolving textures and darkly psychedelic dreamspaces.
"Phenomenon of Aquarium and Bearded Lady" utilizes a number of instruments, including horns and piano, to create a bizarre dislocated funeral dirge in which the sounds of a slowly cycling jack-in-the-box are not out of place. For fans of musicians like Jacques Berrocal, who prefer their free jazz with a heavy dose of whacked-out eccentricity, this is about as good as it gets. "Dirty Fingernails" is something else entirely, a longform exploration of outré textures, combining mysterious trebly noises with percussive bleeps of mysterious origin. It all comes across like the soundtrack to an alechemical ritual performed by rickety Victorian-era cyborgs in an abandoned subway tunnel at the end of time. In other words, prime Nurse With Wound territory. The reworked versions tacked onto the end don't add anything special, and compare unfavorably to the originals, but it is nice that they are included. It's great to have this one back in print.
The seemingly endless Nurse With Wound reissue program continues unabated with this digitally remastered version of Homotopy To Marie, presented by United Jnana in a digipak with partially restored artwork and, oddly, the same augmented tracklist as the 1992 World Serpent CD version.
Part of the problem with a CD reissue program is figuring out how to balance the two requirements of the collectible reissue. First, that it be a faithful replica of the original LP or CD being reissued, complete with original artwork and unshuffled tracklist. Second, that it offer the consumer who already owns the original an extra incentive to repurchase: b-sides, bonus tracks, remixes, etc. United Jnana's reissue of Homotopy curiously fails to satisfy either requirement, and merely succeeds at putting back into print a slightly superior version of the World Serpent CD from the early 1990s. The problem? The inclusion of the track "Astral Dustbin Dirge," not included on the original United Dairies Homotopy LP. The track was included on the 1992 CD version of the album, perhaps as an incentive for owners of the LP. United Jnana choose to repeat this same augmented tracklisting, even though past NWW reissues had sought to iron out such oddities from the back catalog.
At the risk of disappearing into the endless, tail-swallowing nexus of nerdy, self-righteous record collector ire, I'd like to point out that the inclusion of "Astral Dustbin Dirge" on this reissue is particularly strange, given the fact that the track was already made available very recently on United Jnana's CD reissue of Drunk With the Old Man of the Mountains, on which it belongs, having been originally issued on that LP in 1987. Though the track was apparently recorded during the Homotopy sessions, it does not bear any particularly striking resemblance to the rest of the material on the album. If UJ had wanted to include the track, simply as a historical addendum, couldn't they have put it at the end after a gap of a few seconds, so as not to disturb the sequencing of the original LP? Questions like these exist without an answer, and while this certainly does not ruin the experience of Homotopy, the overall messiness of a well-intentioned reissue program does begin to annoy.
Nitpicking aside, however, one might be curious how Homotopy holds up almost three decades on. The interesting thing about listening to early and mid-period NWW albums now is how striking a contrast they provide to the last decade of Nurse With Wound's output, which has become both more eclectic, and for lack of a better word, safer. I was underwhelmed by the majority Huffin' Rag Blues, mostly because it seemed to lack the chaotic unpredictability and gloriously unhinged strangeness of vintage NWW, qualities which Homotopy possesses in abundance. The digital scrubbing received by these tracks, while it might have excised some of the weird amorphousness provided by old vinyl, mostly works in their favor. Inspired by avant-garde composer Franz Kamin, the tracks on Homotopy explore noises and the silences between them, afterimage and resonating echo. The opening track takes its inspiration equally both from ritualistic krautrock freakouts such as Can's "Aumgn," and the long tradition of purposely obtuse avant-garde techniques, vocal ululations and sighs combined with water drips, jarring noise of uncertain origin, and reverberating room tone. It's an uneasy negotiation that Stapleton, in his prime, was masterful at manipulating.
The title track utilizes the striking of metallic objects (gongs? sheet metal?) to highlight the full range of resonance in the afterimage of percussive sounds. In the mix are some typical Stapletonian dialogue samples of unknown origin, a little girl with an English accent saying: "I didn't know anybody and there was a funny smell." The notion of creating a homotopy (two topological functions that can be continuously deformed into one another) with sound is a unique one, and while I'm not sure that Stapleton ever succeeds at this goal, the conceptual framework lends an atmosphere of complexity to the album, as the listener searches for reflecting, homotopical similarities in its sound sculptures. "The Schmürz" is the longest and most dynamic track on the album. To the metallic resonances of the title track are added a repetitive, Steve Reich-esque sample of military men marching, run forwards and backwards and placed over top of each other in unpredictably askew fashion. Gradually, grating noise and surrealistic, atonal crypto-jazz plonkings are introduced, as well as samples from an old LP of liturgical music. This is the Nurse at its best, as far as I'm concerned: pure audio surrealism, avant-garde anti-music that is nonetheless fascinating, cryptic, suggestive, dreamlike and cinematic in the way it unfolds. Homotopy To Marie, in any form, is essential listening for any truly adventurous fan of esoteric audio.
Mirror, In Camera, HNAS, and Mimir member and Streamline label CEO Christoph Heemann has made available his latest solo release, The Rings of Saturn, limited to 100 copies and available directly from him at his own personal Web site, ChristophHeemann.com. It is the fifth release on the revived Dom Bartwuchs label and comes hand numbered and autographed. Read More