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Strain, Crack & Break: Music from the Nurse With Wound List

Started by purlieu, June 15, 2021, 07:23:51 PM

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purlieu


Anybody given this a listen? Brief history: the first Nurse With Wound album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, came with an inner sleeve designed by Steven Stapleton, listing over 200 artists who'd produced inspiring music according to the band, be it a single piece or numerous albums. The second NWW album, To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl, came with an expanded version including 50-or-so more artists. It's become a shopping list for experimental music fans in the intervening years. The full list (+ annotations) can be found on Wikipedia.

Although I'm familiar with a number of the artists on the list, I've never really bothered going through it, other than occasionally browsing a dedicated blog called They All Exist.

Anyway, a few years ago, Andy Votel teamed up with Stapleton to release a series of compilations based on the list. The first volume came out in 2019, with 13 tracks from French artists. Pierre Henry was the only familiar name to me, although the detailed liner notes revealed a few artists I'd stumbled across in one way or another (notably members of Gong and the chap who did sound design for La Planete Sauvage). These days I seem to have less time to get into new music, literally and mentally, and thus I've been focusing largely on more immediate, poppy stuff, but I decided to give this 2LP set a go, and I'm really glad I did, as it's marvellous, and incredibly varied. Only Red Noise's 'Sarcelles C'Est L'Avenir' falls into the acid kraut-style freakout end of things that I was expecting more of, with plenty of weird moody psychedelic jazz, semi-ambient pieces, even a track which I can only describe as sounding like a French version of Caravan. There are a couple of artists here I'll undoubtedly look deeper into, but the whole thing is really enjoyable, mind-bending and frequently very daft.
The whole compilation can be heard on the Finders Keepers Bandcamp.


The second set is being released on Friday, and is focused on German music. Thankfully, despite most of the usual krautrock benchmarks appearing on the list, none of them are present on the album. A compilation of Can, Neu!, Faust and Tangerine Dream isn't really what this is about. There are a couple of familiar names - I know the Wolfgang Dauner track from its release on ECM, and have Fritz Müller Rock - but the rest looks new to me, so I'm excited to dip in.
Just the one track to hear at the moment, but the rest will probably be up on the 18th.