Nurse With Wound
Salt Marie Celeste

I won't dwell much on this work, an infinitesimal tile of a career now more than thirty years long and as prolific as few others: it is known, the art of Steven Stapleton, genius of incommunicability and musical hermeticism, targets either the head or the guts.

With this "Salt Marie Celeste", released in 2002 in memory of a friend who passed away that same year, Stapleton decidedly aims at the latter, hitting the target fully.

Do not misunderstand me: the entire discography of Nurse with Wound is unassessable. Rarely has a musician been able to explain to us the subjectivity in the enjoyment of a work of art as Stapleton has. In front of his works, as daunting and impenetrable as few, we have the same impressions as we might have in front of Fontana's slashes: exaltation and perplexity remain the exclusive domain of individual sensitivities. However, in front of an extensive discography counting dozens and dozens of releases (among works branded NWW and various collaborations), it is permissible to venture, if not an absolute judgment, at least a comment in relation to the artist's own works. And "Salt Marie Celeste" is certainly an album less significant than others within Stapleton's vast catalog.

In "Salt Marie Celeste" the environmental paradigm is fully embraced (certainly not a novelty in the NWW house), while the frenzy that characterizes the mad industrial collages for which the English artist has been renowned since his beginnings is discarded: among other things, we can assert that we are facing one of the most listenable NWW albums, but the absence of chaos is paid with a minimalism that borders on the criminal.

That Stapleton is a skilled and intelligent musician is beyond question: just consider the perfection of the sounds, the calm ambient breath that gives the right rhythm to the happenings that take place in this formidable staging, the characteristic trademark that remains indelible despite the stylistic change.

In other words, "Salt Marie Celeste" is a masterpiece of form, that fascinates us from the hallucinogenic cover, but that is ultimately lacking in content.

And say what you will, but I challenge anyone (sane, sober, or not under the influence of drugs) to get excited about a single composition lasting an hour, in which the same theme is repeated without appreciable variations.

In "Salt Marie Celeste" there is only one idea: a sort of somber orchestral wave built with meticulous care, that rises and falls in a loop, and on whose crest macabre details are added (the creaking of a door opening, the roar of an engine, the murmuring of a thunderstorm): details that, in a nightmare dark-ambient context, can also generate unease, but in fact do not lead to that emotional intensity climax we might expect from such a work.

Evidently, this was not Stapleton's objective (and who knows what Stapleton's objectives are!), and in certain respects, his effort not to fall into a banal late-nineteenth-century gothic horror-ambient is appreciable. Perhaps, we could dare say, it is simply a subdued requiem for a departed friend, something so intimate as to sound almost senseless to those not directly part of the artist's inner movements.

And if Stapleton's ambient disposition is more appreciable in the Current 93 albums dedicated to the stories of Thomas Ligotti (not very dissimilar from what is described here, where however David Tibet's evocative narrations manage to give raison d'être to Stapleton's formidable musical evolutions), we do not feel inclined to recommend the purchase of an album like "Salt Marie Celeste", unless one is madly in love with the artist in question, or looking for the right musical background to hang oneself.