Nurse With Wound — Angry Eelectric Finger- Zero mix, book & delux box
The set comes in an impressive long black box with black blocked letters on its lid, inside its cushion innards you find the two disks in separate colour thick cardboard sleeves and underneath them a Stapleton signed card declaring the small edition of 400 for this art edition. Then over the other side of the box we have the book which is cd size and 220 pagers long, this is beta-lactams first book releases and they’ve really done them self’s proud. The book is covered in a dull laminate four colour jacket, underneath is a hardback black book with similar black on black blocking as the box. Inside the book are fine glossy endpapers and the book it self presents each of Stapleton’s 100 paintings on a page each, alive in vibrate and psychedelic full colour at the end of the book you have photos of them all lined up together. It really is a classy and plush tribute to Stapleton’s artwork.
The first disk in the set presents Anger Eelectric Finger zero mix which is the original four tracks which were created by Stapleton and Potter to send around to the three collaborators, and it’s really as good as and in some ways better than the tampered versions of the piece. Track one opens with ominous struck metal gong like tone that is stretched and echoed off into it’s self, soon a discordant almost eastern string one note strum/ drone is added along with a loud sinister winding sound that seems to completely and utterly surround you as it’s moved around the stereo channels. As the track progresses layers of percussive matter and small textured sounds are added, at about the 10 minute mark the gong tone is lowered muffled and stretched out in strange croaking and sinister sludge that is then tinkled over by stray music box like tones before winding it’s self up once more for stabbing discordant electronic tones. Track two opens with an amp-up and quite violent spring type sound, as if an extremely big spring is been pulled, stretched and let go lose round your head. As the track progresses percussive hits, the winding sound from the first track, a low down drone texture, a weird slowed gun shot tone and other shifting tones are added to create a great surreal yet atmospheric feel. Lastly track three enters starting with deep droning sinister dragging tone from the first two tracks before opening up into a strange stuck ritual like drum element that has an surprising harmonic and earthy saxophone and flute elements mixed on top. The rest of the track concentrates on mixing the sometimes smoky sometimes tuneful jazzy tones with the more bizarre surreal sound elements, before settling into more nocturnal and doomy pitchers as the track exits- All in all a great modern NWW album.
The second and never released before album is entitled Requital For lady Day and features two tracks totalling together a running time of just over 40 minutes. The first track is the title track and is all about building sombre almost church like harmonic folds and trails from the flute playing of Hansi Fischer and saxphone playing of Tim Belbe who both where in Xhol Caravan. I guess it’s best described as having an almost early organic droning Tangerine Dream feeling to it, mixed with melancholy surrealistic air- the track last just over 10 minutes. Next up is the track Ocean( For “saucie” Redpath) and opens up with sound similar to the tide coming in mixed with stretched deep drone tones, I suspect the piece is using flutes once more along with possible bassy piano tone and other electronic and sampled elements to create this huge wall of sound that keeps shifting in and out. It has again quite a sombre dark tone to it all but once more is tinged with surreal touches and a surprising almost dramatic cinematic air. The pair nicely moving the different layers of tone and sound around the stereo channel to great dark effect. A really rather serious and atmospheric album from the pair that shows them using fairly stripped down and harmonic sound sources.
Both the book and the Zero Mix are available separately away from this art edition- but you’ll miss out on the Requital For lady Day album and the box which really makes this set something very special indeed. So it's bests to hunt down the full set if at tall possible- surely one of the most impressive packaging sets of this year.