Search - Nurse With Wound :: Gyllenskold Geijerstam & I at Rydberg's

"Odd" indeed

J. Budinoff | Framingham, Massachusetts United States | 08/18/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I bought this on a whim; I have not heard any of Nurse With Wound's other releases, so I don't know how it compares. Essentially it's three sound collages originally released on vinyl in the 80's, then reworked in the 90's for new CD versions. So you get 6 tracks on this cd, the originals and the new versions. It's all whispery sound effects, startling sudden noises and atmosphere creation, and I have no idea if any of it means anything, but maybe that's not the point. The closest I can figure is that the track "Dirty Fingernails" seems to be trying to approximate the feeling of disturbance people get relative to the proverbial fingernails scratching on a chalkboard (that's just a description, not a criticism). It's like the way the sound could metaphorically be different if the fingernails also happened to be dirty - which makes me think maybe there's even some subtle humor underlying all this. As an example of contrast, though, there's also an interesting quiet part of the track where background high electronic tones sound like distant birdsong behind the other stuff going on.



None of the tracks have the characteristics of what we traditionally call music; rather, it is sequenced sound effects. I can say that the initial versions are much more abrasive and the reworked ones are quite different, retaining only some of the basic compositional themes. The later ones also have more snatches of tones and repetition of sounds in rhythm, but I still can't call them songs at all. They even include the one part I'd call overtly humorous as the track "Odd" has what sounds like a clown toy band performing an orchestrated bit of a pretty famous melody (from a classical piece I think but its identity escapes me). But even that is just treated like a sample in the midst of the piece, not something that turns it into a "song" in any way.



If you like avant-garde noise-art it does stay sonically interesting throughout, but while it evokes atmosphere, I can't really say it evokes emotion. I'm told that's not the case with Nurse With Wound's best work. So maybe this isn't the place to start, but it was enough to make me want to hear the better-known stuff like Homotopy to Marie."