Nurse With Wound
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella

THE REVIEW

Recorded in 1978, “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella” (for friends "Change Meeting") is the dazzling debut of the monstrous entity led by Steve Stapleton.

At the time, Nurse with Wound were a trio of quirky friends, obsessive collectors of the most absurd music the world could offer. Anything could be purchased in their furious raids on shops around the world, with no prohibition other than adhering to three fundamental principles: albums featuring long compositions, a total absence of vocals, and bizarre covers. What, then, could emerge from the minds of these unwitting cultists of the most extremist collecting?

The work itself is now to be counted among the cornerstones of the British industrial scene of the seventies, but the proposal of Stapleton and company stands apart from the deeds of acts like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, who at the time were setting the standards. The avant-garde inclination of the trio is predominant, the free form, and the strongly pronounced improvisational drive compared to what their illustrious colleagues have ever demonstrated (who certainly did not go down in history as the creators of the most predictable, linear, and catchy music in the world). “Chance Meeting” is a musical joke that knows how to use intelligence and irony, courage to dare and irreverent verve, drawing wisely from what were the musical influences of their youth: the nascent electronic, free-jazz, krautrock from various Faust, Can, and Amon Duul II, without forgetting the Dadaist lessons of figures like Dali and Lautréamont. The three compositions that make up the album are hallucinating symphonies of schizophrenic improvised art, where the repetition of the theme and the industrial matrix obsession do not dwell, leaving infinite prairies for the restless grazing of the various instruments.

Rather predominant is the “lucidly organized chaos” residing in the mind of mastermind Stapleton (unlikely saxophonist and already shrewd behind machines, burgeoning genius of sampling technique and tape manipulation), aided by the surreal flashes of his companions (Indian Heman Pathak and fellow countryman John Fothergill), busy behind the most disparate instruments: a piano, an electric guitar, a Bontempi organ, and assorted tools capable of spazzing wildly into a quagmire that, at times, already anticipates the dark-ritual revolution of friend David Tibet and his Current 93 (of which Stapleton himself will be a stable and lasting member).

How not to think, after all, of the early albums of the Current when listening to the delirious “Blanck Capsules of Embroidered Cellophane” (28 minutes and 21 seconds), which among free flights and assorted dissonances, knows how to offer morbid openings of apocalyptic harmonium and dark thuds of thundering piano. Or listening to the graceless lament (culminating in the delirium of a madman) that breaks anguished into the electronic rambling of the Can-style “The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal" (13 minutes and 6 seconds). But the morbidity of Nurse with Wound, in this initial incarnation (probably the best, perhaps because not yet autistically enclosed/trapped within the inscrutable walls of Stapleton’s mind alone), does not slip into the horrific, the existential discomfort, the horror music of which their cousins Current will become undisputed masters. “Chance Meeting,” in its chaotic progress, in its apparent lack of meaning, in its seismic swaying (but never mere end in itself cacophony), is imbued with a palpable unease capable of progressively capturing the listener until completely alienating them from the surrounding reality (a prerogative of every Nurse with Wound album), but without ever exhausting or fatiguing their eardrums.

Because if it’s true that, in its most deformed splendor, there is already the meticulous sound research aimed at vivisection/atomization of sound typical of Stapleton’s artistic vision, we find an inspiration, an elegance, a grace in orchestrating the sound “polychromies” and in taming the infinite solutions (sometimes even melodic) that will engage the listener and encourage them to continue listening to the work.

Not only food for the mind, then, but also delightful nectar for the soul, when the ingenuities of youth still allowed some comprehensible word to pass within a discourse that over the years would become untranslatable for anyone residing outside Stapleton’s mind (just think of the peak of Stapletonian hermeticism, the triple “Soliloquy for Lilith”). An example? The classically set piano that occasionally peeks through the clattering of metal sheets, the instrumental tortures, the creaks of percussion, wind instruments, and electric guitar.

And to think that one day these three arranged to meet in front of the studio immediately after each buying an instrument to strum in absolute freedom: perhaps not even they were realizing that from those sessions would emerge one of the most important albums in the history of industrial music, if not of avant-garde music in general.