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REVIEWS
BRAINWASHED
Written by John Kealy
Sunday, 14 June 2009
This mail order only edition of
Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles’
The Surveillance Lounge is superb.
In addition, there are two extra
CDs of drastically different versions
of the album. Creaking and groaning
their way across an audio backdrop
that brings to mind the boggling
landscapes of Yves Tanguy, the
three discs cover the same unnerving
mental states as classic Nurse
With Wound albums like Homotopy
to Marie and Insect and Individual
Silenced. It is the first Nurse
release since Salt Marie Celeste
that has spooked me in any significant
way and it is a welcome return
to weirder moods after the lighter
side of Nurse With Wound that
has been explored with their recent
live and studio output.
With
a title like The Surveillance
Lounge, this might suggest that
the (un)easy listening style employed
on Huffin’ Rag Blues has
persisted but that is not the
case. When elements of easy listening
music do appear, it throws a sinister
normality amidst the even more
sinister strangeness. On "Yon
Assassin is my Equal," the
introducion of a relatively inoffensive
lounge rhythm puts me on edge;
Stapleton and Liles combine the
annoyance of being stuck in a
waiting room with an existentialist
anxiety. Claustrophobic and paranoid,
the music and incidental sounds
haunt the listener, creating the
sweaty discomfort of a bad dream.
The nightmare continues with “The
Golden Age of Telekinesis”
where there is a fabulous, violent
midsection featuring a demonic
auctioneer that suddenly cracks
open into a quiet, disorientating
abyss.
Elsewhere,
disembodied voices speak in French
and German, bringing to mind the
regrettably underexplored Echo
Poème Sequence releases.
In these moments, the unearthly
beauty of Stapleton's audio surrealism
come to the fore. Yet no matter
how wonderful parts of The Surveillance
Lounge get, the dripping dread
is never far away. Stapleton and
Liles conjure up an surreality
where the sublime is dangerous
and the benign is unfamiliar and
threatening. The whole experience
recaptures that early obsession
with Le Comte de Lautréamont’s
Maldoror and the darker moments
of that novel are mirrored in
the viscous quicksilver of “Close
to You.”
The
other two discs in The Memory
Surface are dedicated to earlier
versions of The Surveillance Lounge.
The album started off as a soundtrack
to F.W. Murnau’s Der Brennende
Acker before evolving into the
album described above. The soundtrack
version of the album is a different
beast altogether, the vast majority
of the music bathed in vinyl surface
noise like a fog obscuring a landscape.
The effect is reminiscent of Philip
Jeck’s work, crusty old
records being given a new life
in an unintended way. It is impossible
to tell how much (if any) of the
material is vinyl-sourced but
the alien nature of the sounds
suggests that whatever sources
were utilised have been completely
shorn of their original contexts.
Elements are recognizable from
The Surveillance Lounge but there
is a large difference between
it and the music created for Murnau’s
film.
Also
included are early mixes of “The
Golden Age of Telekinesis”
and “Yon Assassin is my
Equal,” which are familiar
sounding but still a far cry from
the finished versions. They are
different enough to warrant their
inclusion but overall they lack
the intensity of the The Surveillance
Lounge versions and the atmospheric
allure of the older Murnau soundtrack
versions. However, from a phylogenetic
standpoint they allow a glimpse
into the fossil record (as it
were) and provide the missing
link between the soundtrack and
the album.
The
Memory Surface is well worth buying
over the standard version of the
album. While a lot of Nurse With
Wound special editions are aimed
at the hardcore fan, this is one
instance where the special edition
trumps the standard version hands
down. What Second Pirate Session
did for Rock’n Roll Station,
The Memory Surface does for The
Surveillance Lounge.
WEIRDOMUSIC
Go ahead, overwhelm yourself.
True, you could just pick up the
new Nurse With Wound album, The
Surveillance Lounge, and bask
in its complex web of wyrd. Or
you could dive deep into the temporal
abyss of The Memory Surface, a
three CD set available only through
mail-order, featuring the aforementioned
album plus “studio outtakes,
historical documents, the sequential
evolution of an album and a primitive
version of 'The Surveillance Lounge'.”
This is your best bet and worth
every extra penny.
Let’s
begin with the brilliantly named
The Surveillance Lounge, which
has been heralded by some, those
who didn’t quite grasp the
ingenuity of Huffin’ Rag
Blues, as a return to form for
Steven Stapleton. But there is
a marked progression here. Stapleton
may be sharpening old tools but
he is using them to create new
and surprising soundscapes that
seem convincingly ancient and
forbidden. There is an unsettling
mood that builds, bristling with
what sounds like old EVP ghost-recordings,
with layers of atmospherics accumulating
eerily until they discharge in
bursts of cacophony.
In
considering the liner notes to
the bonus discs, we’re told,”
In 2007 Steven Stapleton and Andrew
Liles were invited by the Friedrich
Wilhelm Murnau Foundation via
In Famous to perform a live soundtrack
at La cité de la Musique,
Paris, to the 1922 Murnau film
'Der Brennende Acker.'”
This soundtrack comprises Akts
One through Six, followed by early,
drastically different mixes of
material from The Surveillance
Lounge.
Many
of the recordings are artificially
aged to sublime effect. The crackle
of ostensible surface noise takes
us backward in time, where subtly
shifting layers of sound induce
fits of nostalgic unease. There
are hints of dreadful ritual,
set in a landscape of ghostly
decadence, recorded on some ancient
medium. Strains of delicate beauty
come and go; glimpses of distant,
murky places, insistent spirits
of lost eras. Atmospherically,
this project is akin to the short
fiction of Thomas Ligotti or the
suggestive creepiness of Robert
Wise’s The Haunting. It
quietly invades the theater of
the mind, triggering strange associations
and feelings: the pain of memory
and its mercurial nature, the
fine line between consciousness
and dream. In doing so, it invites
collaboration with the listener
rather than passive absorption.
What you hear may not be as jarring
as the part of you that responds.
To
maximize your appreciation of
this experience, slap on your
best headphones and sit in a quiet,
darkened room. No words can prepare
you for the sonic phantasmagoria
and the singular mood it conjures.
Repeated listening may induce
an experience analogous to rapture
of the deep. Even in a career
marked by consistently brilliant
experimentation on a radical level,
The Memory Surface stands out
as a masterpiece. This is adventurous
listening at its finest. Absolutely
essential. Steve
Aydt
COKEMACHINEGLOW
Steven
Stapleton, who for thirty years
has been recording under the moniker
Nurse With Wound, is to music
what David Lynch is to film: an
ambitious experimentalist inspired
by the brash antics of Dada and
the trippy vibes of Krautrock,
whose releases win glowing reviews
(“Genius, pure unadultarated
genius”) as well as biting
critiques (“And no one seems
to give a shit”). In some
of his more recent releases, like
Lynch, Stapleton has dredged the
wretched from the mundane—in
the Shipwreck Radio series, he
and collaborator Colin Potter
reworked field recordings from
the fishing village of Svolvær,
Norway into sonic flotsam; in
last year’s Huffin’
Rag Blues, he highlighted the
wasted dirtiness of Martin Denny-style
exotica. But in The Surveillance
Lounge, Stapleton, along with
longtime collaborator Andrew Liles
and a team of vocalists (including
David Tibet, leader of the mystical
folk outfit Current 93), dredge
the wretched from outright squalor.
Nothing if not a monument to panic-inducing
terror, Nurse With Wound’s
latest full-length gives us some
idea of how it would feel to have
one’s soul annihilated in
the Black Lodge, the demonic lounge
hall of Twin Peaks.
Creepy
is a great word to describe some
of the more memorable selections
of Stapleton’s 122 collaborations,
albums and singles, and it is
an especially appropriate descriptor
here. Based on a commission for
a live soundtrack of F.W. Murnau’s
1922 silent film Der Brennende
Acker—which delves into
such heavy themes as greed, devotion,
and death—the album’s
four extended tracks are full
of ghoulish drones, jarring transitions,
and some of the most unsettling
vocals (an unpredictable mix of
jabbering, croaking, and clipped
yelling) ever recorded. The mood
reaches a fever pitch with the
cracked-out horse race monologue
of “The Golden Age Of Telekinesis,”
driven by hypnotic percussion
and accented with a child’s
screams and bursts of high-frequency
feedback. In terms of uncompromising
hideousness, The Surveillance
Lounge rivals the famously obtuse
“game pieces” of John
Zorn’s Cobra (2002) and
the hilariously offensive Top
40 medleys of the Residents’
The Third Reich ‘n Roll
(1976).
But many listeners will no doubt
have lost their nerve (to say
nothing of their patience) long
before they reach the grating
musique concrète freakout
at the five-minute mark of “Yon
Assassin Is My Equal,” and
that would likely be the cut-off
point for most everyone else.
Frankly, even a Bastard Noise
fan is bound to be at least a
little disturbed by this one.
I can scarcely imagine the right
moment for anyone in any situation
to sit through The Surveillance
Lounge. If it had been released
in the years when American troops
were subjecting detainees to hours
of tunes played at ear-splitting
volumes, though, it would have
probably have gotten a lot of
play at Guantánamo Bay.
DUSTED
I would
wager that most Dusted readers
are already familiar with Nurse
With Wound’s lengthy discography
of audio surrealism. But if not,
you’re encouraged to check
out the Brainwashed NWW page and
the Wikipedia entry. The thirty-year
journey of Steven Stapleton and
his collaborators – including
frequent partner Andrew Liles
on this album – is a tribute
to Dada, like a Tristan Tzara
text interpreted via abstract
sound.
For
The Surveillance Lounge, NWW fleshed
out pieces composed for a silent
film soundtrack and turned them
into four long songs, each around
the 16-minute mark. To a great
extent, though, this can be considered
one long flowing text, as the
track divisions could fall almost
anywhere. With such a surrealist
assemblage, one person’s
ending is another’s beginning.
This is a very subtle album, which
is both its strength and its weakness,
depending on your proclivities
and expectations. Ominous throughout,
and calm more often than not,
the music can easily fade into
the background – which,
ironically, works well when it
suddenly bursts into startling
cacophony after you’ve forgotten
it’s even on. The dynamics
at play can be a bit dangerous
when put on late at night, as
it will either be too quiet most
of the time, or too loud in its
random eruptions. Headphones are
recommended.
If there’s one word that
describes The Surveillance Lounge,
it’s dread. Seemingly innocent
sounds – shifting static,
crinkling and clattering –
become drenched in foreboding
against distant drones and mysterious
reverberations. The slow piano
of the opener, "Close To
You,”; cut-up radiophonic
voices, shouts, and screeches;
cloudy murmurs and chanting; crazed
factory buzzings and electronic
fuzz: All of Stapleton’s
sounds refuse to lie still. The
intense shrieks, howls, whooshing,
and scraping of the occasional
frenetic passages often come out
of nowhere, and quickly subside
back to whence they came.
The
most memorable piece is "The
Golden Age of Telekinesis,”
which begins to build with exquisite
patience at about the five-minute
mark, and is still on its way
up several minutes later. Simple
rattling percussion accelerates
the pulse as freakish sounds become
more and more insistent, until
it implodes with a sci-fi squelch
into near-silence. Few other moments
on the album match its intensity,
which comes not entirely from
the injection of rhythm and more
from the passage’s sense
of purpose.
The Surveillance Lounge is certainly
not an easy listen, and its crazed
moments may put off those looking
for a purely spooky listen. The
quieter points may do the reverse.
It took several listens for the
album’s personality to come
through for me, and I’m
still not entirely convinced.
But it’s nonetheless a masterly
performance if you’re prepared
to give it some time. By
Mason Jones
POPMATTERS
Last
we heard from Nurse with Wound,
Steven Stapleton was mining the
depths of ‘30s swing music,
desperately trying (and not entirely
succeeding) to find a way to turn
it into something ironic and/or
difficult. While it seems odd,
then, to laud an artist usually
referred to as “experimental”
for backing away from experiments
for the sake of something a little
less unexpected, that’s
exactly what happens, as The Surveillance
Lounge seeps in and takes hold
of whatever space you’re
hearing it in. The release is
almost exactly what we have come
to expect from Nurse With Wound:
long, spooky soundscapes punctuated
by noise, sinister voices, and
the occasional rhythm section.
Despite the demarcation implied
by the presence of four separate
tracks, the entire 66-minute album
is one piece, in that you’d
be hard-pressed to tell any of
these pieces from the other. The
only exception is, perhaps, “The
Golden Age of Telekinesis”,
as its second movement contains
a building percussive rage structured
upon tribal, rhythmic drums, and
lots of malicious static. The
opener “Close to You”
starts out with a few pianos,
“The Part of Me Which is
That Part in You is Now Dead”
proves the most frightening of
the bunch with its proclivity
for startling the listener, and
“Yon Assassin is My Equal”
surprises most by making the listener
wait for a climax that never really
comes. All, however, are dark
journeys down untraveled paths,
and that is exactly what Stapleton
(here with cohort Andrew Liles
and Current 93’s David Tibet
among others) does best.
XLR8R
Steven
Stapleton’s latest release
as Nurse With Wound marries some
of his long-floating tendencies:
serenely eerie feedback loops,
voices screaming and/or shuddering
in various foreign languages,
and barely-there piano tinkling.
Where last year’s Huffin’
Rag Blues threatened to tip Stapleton’s
hand with cringe-inducing moments
of beatnik lounge collage, The
Surveillance Lounge offers less
in the way of surprise, but returns
to the starkness and po-faced
absurdity of his (cringe) canonical
albums. Like all of NWW’s
best work, this is one to put
on when you want to feel your
room slowly close in on you. As
good and familiar as that can
feel, it’s hard not to feel
like NWW’s work is a bit
of a shell game at this point
in Stapleton's career—though
that should only add to the charm
for fans.
RECORD
COLLECTOR
Steve
Stapleton returns from his dalliance
with easy-listening on Huffin’
Rag Blues with another surrealist
menagerie of the grotesque. This
Surveillance Lounge is overflowing
with sinister phantasms, exhuming
malevolent fantasies mapped out
by Comte de Lautréamont’s
foul anti-hero, Maldoror. Stapleton’s
been here before, of course: his
debut long-player, Chance Meeting
On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing
Machine & An Umbrella, took
its title from the pages of the
Count’s most infamous horror
story.
“I
drew register a little exaggerated,
in order to create something new
in the sense of the sublime that
sings of despair only in order
to oppress the reader, and make
him desire the good as the remedy.”
In describing his own compositional
methods, Lautréamont illuminates
the atomic mechanisms inherent
in Stapleton’s work. Nurse’s
tapestries convey a sense of unease,
a visceral feeling that cloaked
assassins lie around the next
corner, venturing beyond the smooth
dark ambience of their black-vested
peers. While screaming out its
perversion with decadent pride,
The Surveillance Lounge also fails
to admit any light. That the “reader”
is required to seek the “remedy”
elsewhere – that is its
one inherent flaw.
DISCOGS
A
return to form for Stapleton &
co after the easy listening sounds
of Huffin Rag.This brings go mind
earlier erie masterpieces such
as "Homotopy to Marie"
With it's continually shifting
back drop go disembodied voices
scuttling percussion tinkleing
piano's plus the familiar clanks
and drones.The mail order only
special edition comes wonderfully
packaged with two card walleted
bonus discs housed in a polyproplene
box.Essential listening for the
avid NWW fan,with it's facinating
development of the Memory Surface's
evolution sprawling over the 3
disc set. Highest possible recommendation
10/10.
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