The following was written for a friend who picked up the release Paranoia in Hi-Fi by Nurse With Wound but was having great trouble getting into it. After spending the time putting this together, I decided that it was too indispensable not to make public. I am fairly certain that as of right now, there is nothing else like this anywhere on the web, and it's the absolute best I can do based on my own knowledge and music collection.
First of all, the tracks on this disc are irrelevant. They appear to be arbitrarily indexed, as if to say it doesn't matter what point in the piece you skip to -- you're going to hear something different. In fact, there have been four editions of this CD and they have all been tracked differently. I think one version has the piece on 4 tracks instead of 79 tracks, and that may be closer to the way the piece was initially put together. For practical purposes, I have separated this description into larger chunks of tracks, which theoretically you could group together and rip as-is from iTunes if you think that will help you digest it. The bottom line is that I do not believe the knowledge below actually helps you appreciate the music, although it might act as one of those self-guided walking tours that you can get in professional art exhibits.
Tracks 1 to 4: Cooloorta Moon
The album begins *briefly* with the guitar scribbles from "The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal," from the first album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), played over the top of a radio broadcast introducing the 1989 single "Cooloorta Moon." This same radio broadcast has been used in NWW pieces before to describe the band with this tagline: "Think jazz, think punk attitude." Then this segues directly into "Cooloorta Moon," which plays for the bulk of the section. This is the samba-like track with the slide whistle and the mooing. Toward the end, some of the noise from 1979 comes back, but only briefly.
Tracks 5 to 9: Easy Listening Nightmares
This is predominantly "(I Don't Want to Have) Easy Listening Nightmares" from the 1995 mini album, Alice the Goon. This was recorded on site at a festival in Nevers, France and released in a limited edition until its standard release came out, around the year 2000.
Tracks 10 to 21: Sylvie and Babs/Hot Catz
Throughout track 18, this is essentially the album The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion from 1985, edited into smaller bites. At the time this was a legendary surrealist take on the Rat Pack swing era. The first bits are from "You Walrus Hurt the One You Love" but this transitions into "Great Balls of Fur" in the midst of track 12. Most of that track is defined by the drum sequence (with a slight horn melody) that sounds like a beginning player practicing, but is in fact the basis for an earlier rendition of "Old Man River" that NWW recorded entitled "Elderly Man River." This is of course spliced up into all sorts of sound bites. In track 18, this transitions into a newer piece from 2008 called "Groove Grease (Hot Catz)" from the album Huffin' Rag Blues. This is more Lynchian swing music and one of the most accessible albums the band has recorded (to its detriment, I think).
Tracks 22 to 25: Mary Jane
After a brief interlude, these tracks predominantly compose "Mary Jane" from the 2000 album Santoor Lena Bicycle, a collaboration with avant violinist Aranos—which I do not own and have never heard in its entirety. It was released only in an art edition in a custom painted board package that I typically can no longer afford.
Tracks 26 to 31: Bone Frequency/Astral Dustbin Dirge/Two Shaves and a Shine
These are miscellaneous pieces from all over the map. The metal-sounding piece is a collaboration with Peat Bog (Steven Stapleton's son-in-law, I think) recorded under the name The Inflatable Sideshow, from 1998. The second, an abrasive cut-up piece, was originally an outtake from early 1982 masterpiece Homotopy to Marie. It first appeared on an outtakes album in 1987 but was restored to the original work in the CD era. Finally, "Two Shaves and a Shine" was a bouzouki piece from the 1999 stoner opus An Awkward Pause, which was granted a lot of awkward remixes, including this one that quotes the classic Contortions no-wave anthem "Contort Yourself."
Tracks 32 to 38: Spiral Insana/A Piece of the Sky Is Missing
Most of this, through track 35, is the 1986 album Spiral Insana edited down to new form. This album is an experiment in ambient dynamics, on which all the tracks segue together and are hard to discern, though much of it originally appeared on side two of the LP. Some of the material toward the end did not appear until CD release in the mid-'90s. Around track 36, this transitions into the percussive "A Piece of the Sky Is Missing," a track from 1989.
Tracks 39 to 42: Rock 'n Roll Station
This is predominantly the title track to the 1994 album, another magnum opus in the NWW oeuvre, in which rhythm and vocals are explored; consider this the Nurse With Wound approach to hip-hop. This is a reworking of a track by French musician Jacques Berrocal, who also contributes the vocals.
Tracks 43 to 65: Rhythms and Blues
After the late '80s ambient phase, NWW turned to rhythm experiments. This selection begins with "Creakiness," an exploration of cartoon sound effects from 1991, then transitions into "Two Golden Microphones," the centerpiece of 1994's Rock 'n Roll Station. Around track 48, this becomes "Subterranean Zappa Blues," a Waits-like outtake from the same album. Tracks 51 to 55 revisit the first collaboration with Aranos, from 1997's Acts of Senseless Beauty. This is "A Window of Possible Organic Development," and the only truly rhythmic track from that experiment (you can identify it by the violin). Next up is a montage of pieces from the 1996 album Who Can I Turn to Stereo?, another accessible album that takes the rhythms of Rock 'n Roll Station and expands them into a trippy new piece with an "exquisite corpse"-style narration by a man with a foreign accent. The primary work featured here is "Yagga Blues," but the montage ends with a guitar lick from "Monument for Perez Prado." Around the beginning of track 58, the piece switches gears completely... The glass crunching is the opening bit from "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind" from 1982's Homotopy to Marie, an album that presents suspense and tension in dark atmospheres, like touring a mental asylum after dark. At this point, the montage of pieces becomes so layered and complex that it is hard to distinguish all of them, but for the most part this section finishes with an untitled drum-n-bass piece from the 2006 outtakes record Rat Tapes One, sandwiched between parts of the Shipwreck Radio project from 2005 that includes a Deadhead from Lofoten, Norway talking about his favorite band and a woman pretentiously discussing art.
Tracks 66 to 79: Women and Atmospheres
The album ends with a blend of mood pieces and various European women singing, chanting, whispering, and reciting from throughout NWW's career. This begins with Laetitia from Stereolab and a full-blown Stereolab collaboration from 1993 called "Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason)." You can hear the Kraut-like prog kick in around track 69. Much of the following section is built upon the track "Dada x" from the 1980 album Merzbild Schwet, a lost classic and one of my favorite early NWW works. The following juxtaposition of a French woman and a hypnotic German woman incanting something about death in the night is from the various Echo Poeme sequences released in 2005, particularly The Little Dipper Minus Two and Sand Tangled Women. By track 73, the sounds recede into the swaying textures of 2003's Salt Marie Celeste, a longform piece about a ghost ship; it appears to be laid over the electronic humming that defines 1988's ambient triple-album masterpiece Soliloquy for Lilith, then fades out.
