Nurse With Wound / Organum • A Missing Sense / Rasa (United Dairies, 1985)

"Music to clear a room by" is how a colleague once put it. This is coming from he who is a proud owner of that record which has a rotoscoped demon baby on it's cover...Black Sabbath, ugh...and with Dio no less...

To go into the ever growing history of Nurse With Wound would be an act of futility. Organum presents the same challenge. Both are less bands than artists embracing the tenet Pop Art; brand name over identity. Nurse With Wound is really Steven Stapleton, and respectively Organum is David Jackman.

Side one is perhaps the only cover that I know of anything by Robert Ashley. Using Automatic Writing as it's base (the mumbled words, quiet organ tones), Stapleton then adds the typical NWW sound on top; abrasive scrapings, bursts of white noise, low tuba notes, and all manor of studio trickery. This piece was originally a private tape Stapleton made for himself to listen to while tripping. Automatic Writing was the only other music he could listen to in that state without feeling paranoid.

A Missing Sense has that late night feeling where ambient sounds are amplified once they are no longer competing for space. A dog barking in the distance has more dramatic implications once the din of cars, cell phone conversations, or even just the low level hum of daytime activity ceases. The listening instructions are that the piece is to be played at a very low volume. In comparison, but clearly from another dimension, Brain Eno's Discreet Music has the same request. But where Eno has you watching the afternoon drift along, A Missing Sense is not unlike that state of paranoia that Stapleton wished to escape from. Voices that are barely legible seem to come from all sides. The air is never calm, little cells of events erupt without any resolution. It's as if the negative space around us has been reviled to be full activity, unknown to the naked ear.

Organum's Rasa fills all of side two, having heaviness of a Tibetan ritual. Long drones, some sort of metallic clanging, and a whispered vocalise come at you immediately. There is no buildup here, all sense of western musical notion is dispelled. The moment the piece starts, it's all various drones; some drones are shorter, some longer. The metallics play what would be considered a solo, but even then the notion of a pre determined random even to have a conclusion must be dispersed. If this description sounds very La Monte Young, it's because it does. There is some aahhhhing in the background that comes close to Drift Study, you would think there is a sampling of the Shandar record going on.

Like almost all early Nurse With Wound releases at some point in the 1990's they were reconfigured. Some long out of print record had a few of it's tracks placed next to something also from a long out of print record and this configuration was given a new name. When A Missing Sense was reissued, the Organam piece was gone, but you got two other NWW rarities in it's place. Roughly about the same time, Jackman had started to reissue compilations (getting as far as volume two) that worked on the completion through obscurity theory. Rasa, uncredited as to it's original source was placed on Volume One.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Rasa