Nurse With Wound — A Sucked Orange / Scrag!
The two discs come in a full colour soft touch laminated six panel digisleeve. This features A Sucked Orange original artwork of a man with a bird-head on the front cover, three new surreal colleges on the inside panels, plus a brief write-up about the releases, track listings & the original artwork for the Scrag! tape.
Both of the releases here are built from off-cuts & drastically cut snippets of tape which were left over from the following 1980’s NWW albums : Sylvie & Babs, Spiral Insana, and Large Ladies With Cake In The Oven. So both are real surreal sonic chocolate boxes, as you don’t know what you'll get from track to track.
The first disc takes in A Sucked Orange, and this features twenty nine tracks which each last between just under the minute mark to just shy over the four minute mark- but most of the tracks here hit around the minute plus mark. These tracks dart all over the place from: Comic string instruments strums that have playful toy trumpet honks ‘n’ squeaks over the top. To moody & sustained synth drifts, through to odd mixture of unhinged B movie dialogue over unsettling ambient drifts, onto to masses of weird baying demon like laughter & shrieks. Through to entrancing tribal loops that are a-spin with all manner of scratches, snakes, backwards elements & brooding drone matter. Over to looped old 1950’s America TV dialogue samples over spinning ‘n’ churning textured backgrounds, onto darting & playful piano runs, through swirls of metallic snips over cluttering junk like runs & hints at bouncing comic wow guitar textures via strange water rushing ‘n’ bubbling. The just over fifty minute releases is a strange & often manic sonic trip which both entertains, puzzles & even at times freaks you out.
Disc two is taken up by Scrag!, which I guess you could call A Sucked Orange's smaller but equally strange brother- as it follows similar ground & at times utilize the exactly same tape elements, through mostly they are presented in a different manner. The release features ten tracks which fall between just under a minute to near on five minutes- the tracks here do tend to be a little longer, but with a total running time of 28.35 it’s shorter than A Sucked Orange. Also I guess the pieces here are often also a bit more layered & involved than the first discs too. The tracks here go from mixes of manic laugher & textural fumbling that are build into an almost rhythmic manner, and lined with disorientating dialogue loop samples & weird theatrical surreal comic talking. Onto mixtures of rubber band pluckings & bouncing string plucks that are mixed with off-kilter jazz horn playing. Over to looped layers of oriental talking with discordant & wavering layers of plucked strings underneath. Through mixtures of church organ dwells & warbled/ mumbled vocals. On the whole Scrag! is a rewarding enough little release, though at times the re-use of some of the sample elements from Orange do seem a little glaring…I guess it’s best to play this some time after Orange.
On the whole this is a welcome & nicely put together & presented reissue of these late 80’s NWW release, and as I mentioned at the start of my review it works as a handy & relatively accessible introduction to the world of this very much one off project.