Nurse With Wound - Alice the Goon
(United Dairies)
The best thing about Nurse With Wound is that they look scary and they sound scary, but really
they are mostly funny. Wholly devoted to a musical embodiment of some of the more audience
challenging aspects of 20th Century art movements, they have, over the course of the last twenty
or so years, produced an impressive, if at times unlistenable, catalogue of recordings which have
been erroneously categorized variously as noise, drone, experimental, industrial, and so forth.
Those who sell Nurse With Wound short (or, really, Steven Stapleton, the sole member and
visionary of the "group," though he has frequent collaborators) through such limited labels have
missed the best part: the punchline. At this late date, Nurse With Wound has been more overtly
exposing the whimsical dadaist humor which weaves its way through most of their better
recordings.
Alice the Goon is a reissue of a one-sided, one-track, vinyl-only release which was
available for sale for only two days in May of 1995, at a music festival in France. Fortunately for
us (and unfortunately for the suckers on eBay) the reissue is available on both vinyl and cd, and
features an extra track, recorded at the same time as the original issue track, but resulting in over
three times as much music. The music provided on this release is as striking and unusual as
anything else Nurse With Wound has produced, but has the added bonus of having each track
be so disparate from the others as to provide a nice overview of what might be expected on other
Nurse With Wound releases. Also, like most Nurse With Wound releases, Alice the Goon
features some fantastic cover art: a creepy hand drawing of, I guess, goons, surrounded by crazy
psychedelic lettering, credited to the always fantastic Babs Santini (aka Stapleton).
The first track "(I don't want to have) Easy Listening Nightmares" is nine and a half minutes of
good old fashioned Nurse With Wound tom foolery. A bossa nova-style sampled loop is topped
with a muted scrubbing sound, rhythmic bursts of static or some other kind of electrical noise,
and some sassy brass. Like any good Nurse With Wound track, well enough cannot be left alone:
soon the horns are being processed and deranged, soaring tones float in and out of the mix, a
high pitched squall runs around the background, and some nasty sheet metal guitar skronk
bounces in and out of the left channel, occasionally complementing the cacophony and
occasionally completely obliterating it. Finally, some cheeky broad is explaining to us "its so
easy, baby, its so easy, easy, really easy" and we have to admit that she is right.
The bonus track "Prelude to Alice the Goon" is a more somber piece, divided into two parts. The
first is bass driven, founded on a simple plucked line, and buried by other reverbed fragments,
space wind, and crazy wah-wah alien voices. Its less "musical" than the first track, but has a
more haunting presence, and is more difficult to decode (and, thus, more rewarding in the long
run). This song also more perfectly demonstrates Stapleton's genius: it eventually comes
together into cohesive whole, despite the fact that its construction truly feels random and
improvised; the music is constantly shifting and evolving, filled with the constant clatter of what
sounds like randomly dropped metal pipes, hand played drums, a droning female chorus, piercing
rings, and other unidentifiable noises. The second part is a more sparse and spacey chunk,
comprised largely of faint drones and heavily processed voices. It evolves less than the previous
two pieces of music but is an effective ambient piece.
Beware: Nurse With Wound records are import only and expensive (I shelled out seventeen clams
for this platter of barely thirty minutes). However, given the fact that Stapleton easily exhibits
more creativity, originality, intelligence, and wit, pound for pound, than 99% of other working
musicians, its pretty easy to justify the expense. (Also recommended is the recent collection of
collaborations The Swinging Reflective, a two-cd set showcasing Stapleton's personal favorite
Nurse With Wound pairings with other artists, such as Jim Thirwell, Stereolab, Tiny Tim, and many
more).
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