Nurse with Wound

Nurse With Wound's Steve Stapleton has worked with a large number of different artists in the industrial and experimental music scenes over the years, and the Swinging Reflective double-CD compilation collects a number of these collaborations from the '80s and '90s. For anyone unfamiliar with Nurse With Wound, this might be the place to start, since it shows many different facets to NWW (plus it doesn't hurt that this double CD doesn't cost much more than NWW's single-CD albums). Except for the track with Aranos, everything on these CDs has been previously released. Unlike other Nurse With Wound compilations which collect hard to find vinyl tracks, most of this material is already readily available on other CDs, though often on a CD of the other artist and not Nurse With Wound. The earliest track, from 1980, is the noisy "Duelling Banjos," with William Bennett from industrial noise band Whitehouse, which has appeared in a few different versions already. It has the famous "registered nurse" vocal samples and a screeching industrial noise track. The only other pieces from the '80s are the Foetus collaboration on the Brainticket-riffed "Brained by Falling Masonry" and a trio of bizarre songs with Chrystal Belle Scrodd's Diana Rogerson. The '90s tracks include collaborations with everyone from Coil, Current 93, to Stereolab, Legendary Pink Dots, and even Tiny Tim on an odd spoken word piece. The music veers from ambient ritual music with drones and gongs on the Coil track, to weird acoustic folk pluckings on "Angie" with Chris Wallis, to the motorik-Neu!-beat Stereolab track, to the liberal borrowings from Krautrock, psychedelic, electronic music, and older experimental sounds converted into something new. Because NWW is collaborating with artists who are slightly more accessible on many of the tracks, this might be a good place to start for the neophyte, but it's not an essential album. ~ Rolf Semprebon, All Music Guide