Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)

My first Nurse With Wound was Insect & Individual Silenced, thanks mainly to a school coach trip down to that London and the wonderful Virgin Megastore, as was. Otherwise their work - as described by John Gill in Sounds in terms by which I knew I needed to hear it - eluded our local record shops and by extension me. We had a record shop in my tiny market town for about six months, and I recall Geoff, who ran the place, shaking his head and wondering why anyone would name an album Homotopy to Marie while my sniggering contemporaries browsed Def Leppard without actually buying anything, which is presumably why Geoff went out of business. About a decade later I had the first three on CD, including Chance Meeting, but I didn't have a CD player, didn't really plan to buy one, and ended up giving them away.

It's therefore taken me one fuck of a long time to finally hear this, and I'm sort of shocked to discover that it doesn't sound anything like I expected - although this is of course exactly what one should expect from Nurse With Wound. Steve Stapleton has said something about how he regards Homotopy to Marie as the first real Nurse recording, so this was himself pissing about with his pals, technically speaking, and was similarly distant from the insanity of Insect & Individual Silenced, for what that may be worth. The biggest surprise - although it probably shouldn't be - for me, has been how much Chance Meeting sounds like a relative of Faust and other krautrock predecessors* routinely ignored by history of industrial music podcasts put together by edgy fourteen-year olds with pierced eyebrows. Almost all of the sounds on this record are generated by actual musical instruments, albeit by unorthodox means - someone playing the piano with his arse, droning harmonium, and even a long-haired guitar solo. It's all improvised, of course, and I seem to recall reading that none of those involved had so much as picked up a musical instrument before getting this on tape.

It's a racket, as you would expect, but I've always felt Nurse With Wound made more sense as heirs to Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst than to even Yoko Ono's sonic experiments; and in this context, as firmly established by both Stapleton's cover art and the title deriving from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, they work for me - at least in so much as the art of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst works for me. As with the very best music of this admittedly general type, it established the terms by which the listener experiences it, meaning there's probably not much point comparing it to Out of the Blue by the Electric fucking Light Orchestra; and while there have been a few weirdos doing this kind of thing, with the possible exception of Richard Rupenus, no-one really seems to do it quite so well as Nurse With Wound. Alan Trench of Temple Music, amongst others, said Steve Stapleton remains one of the few people he's met whom he would describe as a genius, which I honestly think is fair.

It lives in neither the rock venue nor the art gallery as we know it today, because like the landscapes of de Chirico and the rest, this Chance Meeting takes place in some psychological realm, one which may not even have existed before the needle first encountered the groove; and, should I have failed to communicate as much, it's also a lot of fun to listen to, albeit weird, angular, confusing fun.

*: I've also been surprised by how sonically close it sits to the first Konstruktivists album - clearly a case of shared influences. Steve Stapleton and Glenn Wallis were friends, although Glenn was never particularly a fan of Nurse With Wound.
 

Temple Music - Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing (2009)

Temple Music was formed by Alan Trench and a couple of pals back in 1995 as an outgrowth of other, loosely related things. I saw them live in 2011 - I think it was - and assumed they had ceased to be soon after, reforming as the Howling Larsons and therefore leaving this behind as a coda of sorts. However, it seems I'm mistaken and there have been a number of subsequent releases, two of which I've actually owned all this time, so I guess this may be a reissue.

Some may recall Alan as a patron of World Serpent distribution, the label which brought us Der Blutharsch. Der Blutharsch recorded aesthetically extreme music of pseudo-martial composition which, as such, was often lumped in with others of the stiff right arm brigade - possibly due to the titles, occasional allusions to the Hitler Youth, and appropriation of artwork by Werner Peiner whom you may remember from world wars such as the second one. I had the pleasure of at least one evening on the razz in south-east London with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch. He was an oddball in black clothes with an upsetting haircut, but otherwise seemed like a decent guy; and having spent an unfortunate plurality of evenings on the razz in south-east London with actual Nazis, I feel reasonably certain that he wasn't one.

Anyway, it probably doesn't matter given that he's no longer with us, and Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing was issued, or possibly re-issued in memoriam, which seems fitting. Temple Music had a very much Mediterranean sound, one which seems to foreshadow the more recent music of its crew. It's loss, rocks, sorrow, wine, bleached animal skulls, and whatever token Charon may require for passage across the great river this month, all beneath a killing sun with crickets in the background. The dark ambient tag has inevitably attached itself, but the drones and the jangle of bells in the wind seem to come from something older, and something which has endured despite everything. I've listened to this CD and thought about Albin and wondered just what the hell was going on with that guy, although I doubt I'll ever have an answer. All that remains is the sound of waves lapping against the side of a boat.

Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

Stone Breath / Mike Seed with the Language Of Light - The Ætheric Lamp (2011)

Stumbling across a copy of this in the racks at Hogwild, I only really understood what it was through having met some of those involved, namely Language of Light; and I only knew Language of Light through their performing live on some bloke's allotment here in San Antonio. My friend Alan, formerly a big cheese at World Serpent distribution, told me he was coming to Texas to play live, so we met up for a drink and he was accompanied by Rebecca Loftiss - whom he since appears to have married - and Frank Suchomel, collectively Language of Light. So the three of them performed a sort of improvised thing in, I suppose, the general direction of maybe Pink Floyd, and it was atmospheric and very enjoyable; and personally I was just relieved that it shared no discernible heritage with Death in chuffing June or any of that bunch, seeing as how we're all older, wiser, and keen to move on from the days of simply exploring contentious ideas and imagery.

Alan slipped me a stack of CDRs, which I mostly enjoyed, but I've never had an entirely happy relationship with CDRs because each time I play one I'm always aware that it could be about to remix itself into something sounding like Farmer's Manual; so it was probably guilt which made me pick up this album when I saw it, and clearly it needed an appreciative home.

As anticipated, I'm completely out of my depth here. It's folk, although thank fuck it isn't neofolk as I understand it to be. It might be psych folk, I suppose, but maybe it doesn't matter. The Ætheric Lamp is a split album - Stone Breath on one side, Language of Light accompanying one Mike Seed on the other - fairly different artists taking related approaches to music and doing unfamiliar things with tradition. The vocals are of the kind one expects to hear singing about horses, ploughs, gathering in the blackberries and so on, but the art feels very much of the moment - or at least as of 2011 - invoking traditional forms going back to pre-technological times without simply recreating. Stone Breath's blend of celebration and melancholia utilising all manner of plucked instruments suggests rivers of wine, Bacchus all a-prance, olives, and a generally pre-Christian Mediterranean mood. By approximate contrast, the growling synth and delay of Language of Light suggests some sort of peculiarly rustic analog of early Cabaret Voltaire, and doesn't sound quite like anything else in my record collection, which is why I'm scrabbling around with analogies that probably don't work. It all sounds kind of like how I hoped Current 93 would sound but didn't, because the music on The Ætheric Lamp at least seems to know what it's doing.

The thing to take from all this is, I suppose, the powerful atmosphere the disc brings to your listening space and seemingly without doing very much or pulling any funny faces. I guess this is what folk music was always supposed to be about - simple, moving, and performed with honest motives.