Merzbild Schwet
(United Dairies) Used CD $20.00
Considered the first fully realized Nurse With Wound record, originally released in 1980 — more focused, with editing techniques out in front (abrupt transitions, quirky juxtapositions, strange sounds that would become the NWW hallmark). “Futurismo” begins with clanking rhythms, record skip clicks, and horn riffs before veering off into a crazed quilt of women singing, laughing, and talking in French. About halfway through, wild screeches of distortion disrupt the piece, and then more bizarre sounds take over before ending with a collage of over-modulated electronic hum and rambling piano. “Dada X” goes further into weirdness with silences, creepy creaking noises, tones that build up and collapse, and scattered spoken word in French and English from The Crass’s Eve Libertine. 1994 reissue.
An Awkward Pause
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
“Bizarre, beautiful, frightening and fascinating all at once…, the majority of the album is instrumental and subdued in nature, with the exception of ‘Two Shades And A Shine’ (which begins with an abrupt … bass guitar riff [and] David Tibet’s exasperated vocals...) and the latter half of ‘The Penis Fruit Loop’…, a long shifting piece [with] quiet, swirling ambient sounds / samples, bizarre processed narrative…, reversed and collaged guitar, R2D2-like beeps, upbeat saxophone-led acid jazz-rock on crack, carnival music, insane electric guitar squealings, and various percussive banging….” Single disc, in digipak with insert. From 1999.
Thunder Perfect Mind
(United Dairies) Used CD $20.00
This 1992 reissue of the sister album to the Current 93 album of the same name punctuates soundscape drones with staccato bursts of percussion, origins uncertain, bleeps and bloops thrown in for good measure, and the occasional hoot and/or holler. In jewelbox
Thunder Perfect Mind
(United Dairies) Used CD $12.00
This 2002 reissue (with bonus track) of the sister album to the Current 93 album of the same name punctuates soundscape drones with staccato bursts of percussion, origins uncertain, bleeps and bloops thrown in for good measure, and the occasional hoot and/or holler. In digipak
Who Can I Turn To Stereo
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
A daunting roller-coaster ride from 1996 through strange and abstract soundscapes with weird processed voices thrown in. Perhaps it’s made a little easier by a narrator with a soft voice and Italian accent, even if the words are as surreal and nonsensical as the music around them. One continuous collage of sound, broken down into conventional song-length tracks, with hypnotic electro-dance rhythms comparable to what crop up on “Yagga Blues,” “Space Funk With Springs,” and “Approaching Darkness Fish,” and lulling nursery rhymes.
Spiral Insana
(United Dairies) Used CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
One continuous piece of music, indexed as three, listed as twenty. Guests Robert Haigh, David Jackman, and Chris Wallis mix bowed piano, percussion, radio, loops, and what is credited on the sleeve as “stuff” into an hour-long collage of mashed-up sounds, jarring juxtapositions, buzzsaw distortion, and even a pipe organ. From 1997 with two non-LP tracks.
A Sucked Orange
(United Dairies) Used CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
“A Sucked Orange is basically a much more fleshed-out version of the earlier cassette-only release, Scrag! (United Dairies, 1987)…. [S]nippets of weird noises, absurd samples, abstract sounds, jarring contrasts, spoken word sections. Two thirds of the tracks run for less than two minutes, with only the four-minute tribal … ‘I’m a Frayed Knot’ coming close to sounding like an actual song…. For every oddity, however, there is a really striking moment: the aforementioned ‘I’m a Frayed Knot’ is a wonderful Eastern-tinged percussive number, while ‘Crack Up’, although short, is one of Stapleton’s finest drone works. The vocal pieces sung by Sinan and Ritva are lovely in their own right. In some ways, A Sucked Orange feels like a Nurse With Wound album cut into its constituent parts.”
Live At Bar Maldoror
(United Dairies) Used CD $10.00
The emphasis on live and acoustic instrumentation recorded in the mid-1980s, with little in the way of tape edits, positions the music here in stark contrast to Nurse With Wound’s studio albums, yet the overall feeling of relentless exploration, experimentation and humor still evoke the same moods that Stapleton’s project always does. From 1991
Rock ’n Roll Station
(United Dairies) Used CD $18.00
An atypical Nurse with Wound record for any era, an obvious attempt to create something more palatable, even dance-floor friendly. With its handful of single-length tracks and two quarter-hour collages, the album …[sits] on the fence.… The two collages are prime examples of creative, top-quality NWW…, filled with uncanny sonic juxtapositions, disquieting twists and immersive drones. Peat Bog’s spellbinding didgeridoo performance on ‘Two Golden Microphones’ is a highlight.” In jewelbox from 1994 edition.
Second Pirate Session Rock ’n Roll Special Edition
(United Dairies) Used 2xCD $28.00
Outtakes from Rock’n’Roll Station (originally planned as a double album), never fully completed but which in hindsight benefit from their stripped down atmosphere. “Hypnotic, pulsating, and quite a departure.” Card jacket. Sealed
Soliloquy For Lilith
(United Dairies) Used 2xCD $30.00
Originally recorded and released in 1988, Nurse With Wound’s ambient opus was years ahead of its time, a ground-breaking set of atmospheric sound patterns designed for ritual ceremonies. Reissue from 1993
Salt Marie Celeste
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
One long track where a whisper of sound slowly builds even as it remains quite ambient. Noises are very gradually introduced to the underlying drone and repeated at regular intervals — whizzing; a one-second high-pitched tone that almost sounds like a distant ship’s horn calling for help in the mist; creaking; a low, clattering noise, a bit like thunder and then eventually, other clattering noises. One gets an eerie sense of doom, worthy of a ship slowly sinking. Toward the end, sounds fall away from the original minimalist drone, which ebbs and surges for another five minutes before slowly fading.
Acts of Senseless Beauty
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
“Many of the tracks start out in ambient territory, slow tentative explorations of improvisational scrapes and hums, building slowly or erupting into throbbing avant-rock structures, at which point Aranos’s violin dances and weaves wildly among clattering rhythms and other sounds, eventually to slide back into a droning murky dissonance or dreamy flows. Added to this mix are a few sections of processed vocal and chanting. A bizarre and hallucinatory journey into another musical dimension.”
Funeral Music For Perez Prado
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
This CD collects tracks from two deleted EPs, Yagga Blues from 1995 and Soresucker from 1990, with one track from each considerably extended to their full-length versions. Here you’ll find a pulsing ethno-electro beat, Sarah Fuller jazzy non-word vocals, more punch, more electronic effects. The title track is ambient and meditative, with lots of minimal drones, shifting tones, and no rhythms. “Journey Through Cheese,” now extended to beyond twice its original length, consists of a harsh rhythm clanking mechanically over a collage of tweaked-out noises, from breaking glass and insidious laughter to loud pops of static and more drones.
Sugar Fish Drink (A Layman’s Guide To Cod Surealism)
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
“Could almost be considered Automating, Vol. 3, in that it culls material released on vinyl, mostly from twelve-inch singles from the late ’80s and early ’90s. ‘Cooloorta Moon’ riffs off the weird noise from Wolfgang Dauner’s version of Gershwin’s ‘My Man’s Gone Now’ for a bit of jazz-funk with an upbeat rhythm. The five-part amorphous sound collage ‘Creakiness’ offers a varied mix of everything from calliope to haunted violin music to metallic machine rhythms to found vocals. It seems almost like an insane circus where everything is about to collapse. ‘I Am the Poison’ throws in guitar textures and gloomy vocals from Sol Invictus frontman Tony Wakeford. ‘Swamp Rat’ has a repetitive drum rhythm, lots of background drones, and … contagious laughter. ‘A Piece of the Sky Is Missing’ is mostly a subtle but dark ambient piece, though near the beginning there are pounding rhythms and screeching horns. ‘Nil By Mouth’ gets far stranger, as bursts of electro-noise and pounding percussion contrast starkly with creepy quieter sections of buzzes, chirps, and minor chord drones. The CD ends with a completely revamped version of ‘Brained by Falling Masonry,’ beginning more calm and cosmic, and then crashing with the effects and processing from psychedelic rock to explosions of disruptive noise.”
Soresucker
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00
Kind of a collaboration with Tony Wakeford of Sol Invictus. “I Am The Poison” builds Wakeford’s trippy repeating bass motif; Stapleton provides a backdrop of drones, and mechanical percussion. The industrial sounding “Journey Through Cheese” is constructed around a backbone of pounding machine noise, smashing glass, and clanking metal. First edition from 1990
STEVEN STAPLETON / DAVID TIBET
The Sadness Of Things
(United Dairies) Used CD $13.00
A beautiful and nuanced construction from 1991. David Tibet is “unusually calm and direct [on the title track], and the whole breathes deeply of the sublime without swallowing any of the ridiculous. With just human voice and echo, Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox’s “The Grave and Beautiful Name of Sadness” — the soundtrack to Diana Rogerson’s film Twisting The Black Threads Of My Mental Marionette— dislodges listeners and glides them to somewhere among the protoplasm and dark matter that holds existence together.”
STEVEN STAPLETON / DAVID TIBET
Musical Pumpkin Cottage
(United Dairies) Used CD $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two side-long tracks of strange psychedelic krautrock maximalism.