"LISTEN TO THIS LSD-HASHY-FIXY-JOINTY SOUND!"
Nearly 14 years ago, when I had just broken out into my most experimental phase musically, I purchased an unusual CD called Large Ladies with Cake in the Oven by a "band" called Nurse With Wound. It was put out by a label called United Dairies, of all things, and featured an impenetrable subtitle: Gyllensköld / Mawsookedorwranj / Brained. The whole presentation just seemed so irrepressibly strange and bewildering!
This was not my first Nurse With Wound CD, but it was the first I was ever able to begin to digest, as their "music" was so noisy and unpredictable and overwhelming, yet here it was broken into several short, approachable pieces with titles like "Bearded Lady" and "Red Flipper" and "Head Cold." And though I no longer remember my first reactions to these pieces, I do recall the day I discovered that one of the longer tracks on the disc—called "Glory Hole," I kid you not—was mostly composed of bits and pieces sampled from the soundtrack to David Lynch's cult film Eraserhead, of which I was a big fan at the time.
Thus began my love affair with Nurse With Wound, ultimately just the sonic art project by one Steven Stapleton, a brilliant hippie who loves Futurism and Dada and Surrealism and esoteric '70s music, who lives on a rural farm in Ireland with his performance artist wife and their dozens of children. Stapleton has remained a visionary auteur for three decades now, and while he may not necessarily be my favorite musician, he has surely become my favorite artist.
Large Ladies with Cake in the Oven remained a cornerstone of my Nurse With Wound collection, which now amounts to about 46 compact discs and 14 vinyl LPs, for more than a decade, until the one horrible day several years back, shortly after United Dairies' distributor went bankrupt and all the discs went out of print, when I sadly realized that my copy had succumbed to DISC ROT.
I've since tried to buy it on eBay a couple of times, but the bidding always climbs into the $50-$75 range and, frankly, I can't be sure that another copy hasn't already begun deteriorating as mine did, so I haven't taken the gamble. And all along I have continued to pine for a way to reacquire this music, cheaply, legally, and in a way that supports the artist...
And now I've finally got it...
Sort of.
"TAKE A TRIP TO YOUR INNER LIGHT!"
United Dairies reestablished itself in 2005 with the help of Canadian label Jnana Records. Owner Mark Logan appears to be a great guy with a true passion for Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and related projects, and the relationship thus far has been fruitful. After rereleasing deluxe versions of Nurse With Wound's best-selling record (1988's Soliloquy for Lilith) and possibly best record (1999's An Awkward Pause), plus an album that had never been released on CD before (1987's Drunk With the Old Man of the Mountains), Jnana has now released the 1982 masterwork Homotopy to Marie and its spooky follow-up, 1984's Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's. Now look back up at that Large Ladies subtitle again.
The tracks from Gyllensköld, an EP which introduced Stapleton's ongoing collaboration with David Tibet of Current 93, did appear previously on Large Ladies. The catch? The tracks were remixed and their titles were abridged. Prior to the arrival of the new CD in my mailbox yesterday, I had never heard them in their original form. This disc features both the original versions and 3 of the reworked tracks from Large Ladies, offering the perfect opportunity to compare and contrast them, which I shall now do.
SEVERAL ODD MOMENTS PRIOR TO LUNCH
The track begins with an ominous voice, which could be David Tibet's, heavily flanged and treated so that it is unrecognizable. I cannot tell what he is saying. A brash gong almost interrupts him. It is a repeat of the hard, cold, rattling death chime that was all over Homotopy to Marie. Then a man with a gentle voice sings. He is also flanged and treated, but it is a gentle song. Is it a love song? No, he is singing about "mountains of dead."
More gongs. There is Gregorian chanting in the background. Wait! This sounds like early Current 93. I recognize sounds from both "Falling Back in Fields of Rape" and "Maldoror Is Dead". This is terribly unwelcome in this context, but when put back into its time frame, it certainly makes sense. It falls in line with everything else Stapleton and Tibet were doing together at that time, and as such, it is extremely discomforting and dark compared to Stapleton's previous work. Gong. More chanting, then howling. It is David's piercing, high-pitched screech.
Gong. "When my way was true, wild for you... over mountains of dead." The pleasant man singing the dire song is suddenly interrupted by a sort of throat-scratching, spitting sound, followed by whirs that sound like snores. Gong. An amelodic series of notes plays from a kazoo, with something raspier wailing in the background. "Mountains of dead" comes back on the right, with the ominous voice we first heard on the left. Everything cuts to a brief silence. Now a woman is quietly sobbing... or is she gasping for breath? She is nearly drowned out by masculine groaning. A sing-songy woman's voice comes in, repeating, "We do not hope to turn again, we do not hope to turn." Over and over. Underneath that, she is saying, "It turned out nicely, the ending..." This is quieter, and also repeated.
More groans. David is intoning something. The sobbing woman suddenly turns absolutely hysterical, shrieking with wild, uncontrollable laughter. The groans intensify, and now the woman is crying. Laughing. Crying. "We do not hope to turn again, we do not hope to turn." The hysterical woman is disturbing. David intones, "And then the wild beast showed its claws." Snort. Bleat.
PHENOMENON OF AQUARIUM AND BEARDED LADY
This track begins with some sort of horn or woodwind that plays a slight minor melody over and over. A motif has been established. It is intermittently interrupted by dissonant, muted banging on piano keys. The motif repeats and changes, sounding something like early Coil. The improvisation is almost jazzy in nature. Piano bangs. For a few seconds, a weird, nearly comical humming appears in the background. Bangs. We hear a trickling melody, a hollow sound, apparently plucked on very short strings. It is a nagging sound, tinged with elements of the Far East.
It gets faster. The motif remains in the background, and the piano bangs accelerate, panning from left to right. The nagging sound becomes a bumblebee. It slows again. A crank is turning. Two cranks. Musical gears. A jazzy, high-register saxophone squeals. Everything is going nuts with fast noise and chaos. The nagging is a bumblebee again. All sounds continue in a disorienting hodgepodge. The patterns change but the intensity doesn't leaven. The piano bangs are pitch-shifted upward, as is the motif.
DIRTY FINGERNAILS
The energy shifts and flows into the next track, where a low hum and a high pitched screech are joined together by electric scraping. The screech burrows in deeper, with the whole piece sounding scratchy and electrical. The voltage shifts, on and off. There's a buzz with intermittent screeches. It's an unpleasant and arrhythmic atmosphere. The scratchy, electric scraping, the nonstop screeching, and the bass buzz all make your hair stand on end. The radiation causes cancer. Dr. Frankenstein is drilling holes into your brain. And a chorus of aliens are singing in unison, suddenly. Alien chipmunks. They are the lifeforms brought into being by this excess of electricity. One of them mumbles something, then they chant in chorus... or are they arguing?
From the distance we hear a whiny scrape on one side, and a high pitched squeal on the other, with a whirring scrape behind them both. It's a rhythm now, rocking to and fro, as the sounds get louder and more dissonant. It's a scary and unbearable experience, like digging yourself out of a deep grave, buried alive and panicking, getting dirt under your fingernails. A loud rhythmic buzz simulates your heart as panic sets in. This is followed by a crunching sound, like something being crushed. The squeal and the scrape finally stop.
Now the gentle section of the track begins, but it's hardly a respite. The crunching sounds continue, muffled and metallic. Somebody is trying to break through chains with a shovel or a clipper. A low rhythm grows distant but remains, while wet rocks occasionally bounce off the ground. The wetness can't be water; the moistness is thicker, and more restrictive. A low cranking sound starts up. All the sounds remain gentle, but it just creates tension. Having given up the fight, you are slowly dying as you asphyxiate underground. A muffled gong sounds occasionally against the quiet trickles and scrapes. A gigantic bug must be trying to dig its way into your tomb with its pointy little legs. Something much larger is groaning... or scraping... or erupting. Rhythmically. Caught between the scraping trickle and a groaning rhythm, a creepy little voice starts to break through.
Then static, like on a radio, suddenly bursts forth. A brief snatch of music? No—it's DEEP groaning now, something is vocalizing, and it's not a recognizable language. Something is going to eat you. The atmosphere hurls and churns, but that something is still in control. The groaning is now a chanting, it's pained and unhuman, and it's rising, it's waking. A screech grows loud and hollow as chaos descends, whirling, flanging, rumbling, disorienting. Then silence.
"SEE THE HALLUCINATIONS OF REALITY RISE TO THE RYDBERG VIBES!"
Wow. The Gyllensköld experience is rather daunting. Most Nurse With Wound albums have a thread of darkness throughout them, but in this form, I think that this one exceeds the others. Even something like Salt Marie Celeste, which is essentially the soundtrack of a haunted ghost ship, has a passive ambience to it; this is aggressive in its darkness. And darkness is not the reason I listen to Nurse With Wound. I enjoy the juxtapositions of one sound against the next, the brilliant editing, and most of all, the wonderfully eccentric sense of surreal humor.
Revisiting the reworkings of these tracks is a revelation. Large Ladies featured four reworked tracks made up of Gyllensköld parts: "Bearded Lady," "Odd," "Aquarium," and "Dirty Fingernails." I always wondered how these approximated the original tracks, especially with the abridged names. Only three of these appear on the new CD, as "Bearded Lady" is nowhere to be found.
Other than its length, he biggest difference between "Odd" and its original version is the mood. It begins with the same ominous whisper, which is apparently saying something about the first flowers of summer. Then another throaty sound is quickly followed by a male voice asking, "Did you notice that?" A class of third graders decides to come in and play what they've learned in their Suzuki violin class. The melody plays through, then shifts up a key, to play again. This is the part that really differentiates the versions. The original version doesn't have the Suzuki class at all, though the kazoo part could be a greatly altered version of it, mixed to sound much more sinister. (Come to think of it, you can almost hear the violins very faintly in the background of that part.)
Snort. Snort. Ah, "Mountains of dead" reappears! Then a surprising piano plays a jaunty tune, which may be a Russian folk song. Another scraping throat, then a piano plinks randomly. "Mountains of dead" makes its final appearance. The track ends, and the most noticeable thing about it now, which I never could have noticed before, is that all of the material that sounds like Current 93 has been gutted. At the time this was originally re-released, Current 93 was trying to move beyond their early dark industrial sound to become something folkier and more positively spiritual. Perhaps that was Stapleton's consideration at the time: a favor for a friend.
"Aquarium" is not all that different. The essential difference is an echoey, cyclical, tribal drum track that grows out of the central motif, giving the whole thing a new dimension. The feel of the track becomes, yes, more aquatic, and somewhat lighter. Swirls of banging piano and snippets of overlying melody are thrown from the spinning rhythm, which now grounds the piece by giving it a much deeper, fuller sound. There are sudden breaks to the nagging, melodic cranking, then the high saxophone and the noisy chaos. The noise dances repeatedly. The percussion breaks out again, intensifying everything. It's hypnotic and trancey, occasionally interrupted by blasts of sound, sax, and piano, yet never fades. The piece gains a bit of closure by bringing back all the earlier elements in more dramatic ways. It ends with a woman screeching, "Leave this place, and bring out the wrath of demons upon innocent heads!"
All the electrified elements return in the edit of "Dirty Fingernails," but they are not as immediately disorienting. The screech is most prominent, broken occasionally by the alien ranting, some buzzing, then back to the scrape/squeal combination, rocking and intensifying. It truly is the sound of something horrible coming closer... and closer... Screech scrape screech scrape. Your memories, the ones that make you who you are, are being unwritten by electric tools, rewiring your brain, making you a listless machine. A buzz starts, rhythmic like an alarm, then the crunching sounds return. The quiet interlude is similar to the older version, though the occasional wet trickles, or miniature splashes, become the sound of a dead heart being punctured in a desolate laboratory.
Now someone is breathing, leaning over your dormant body and working furiously. More breathing and scraping and the occasional sound of puncture. Once the bug starts trying to dig in again, and the groaning rhythm starts to press in, I have a profound realization: This is the most claustrophobic music ever recorded. The groaning again becomes deep and guttural, the weird little inhuman voice pipes up, and the digging starts to feel like stretching and pulling. After the short shock of radio static, and the hint of music, the Lady in the Radiator is singing, "In Heaven." A very different ending from the original, and an obvious tie-in to "Glory Hole," which is still lost in the ether of out-of-print records.
For what it's worth, the now-lost "Bearded Lady" is essentially a remix of the last two and a half minutes of "Several Odd Moments Prior to Lunch." The sobbing woman on the verge of hysterics is overlaid by an extended groan in a higher voice, which sounds out in mangled pain, while the "We do not hope to turn again" lady barely gets her words out, and the "turned out nicely... the ending" woman comes back in partial waves, each one louder. There's a better sense of editing here. The sobbing woman never gets hysterical, though, and David intones about the wild beast in perforated fits.
"I'm not really a pacifist; I just don't know how to be violent!"
0 comments:
Post a Comment