Nurse With Wound 'Backside' CD *BACK IN STOCK*

*BACK IN STOCK*

July 2024

New studio album featuring Bladderflask. Originally issued as a limited edition Lp lathe cut.

STEVE STAPLETON, ANDREW LILES AND RICHARD RUPENUS

Contains 20 minutes extra material. New cover art by Babs Santini.

Track Listing

1. Backside

2. Chernobyl Picnic

3. Backside (Cloud Chamber)

Nurse With Wound and Bladder Flask first crossed paths in 1980. The following year saw the release of NWW’s fourth album, Insect & Individual Silenced and Bladder Flask’s debut (and in fact only) album, One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (Orgel Fesper Music.) The LP quickly came to the attention of Steven Stapleton who distributed it via United Dairies and had the following to say when later interviewed for The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox feature:

‘…I love the Bladder Flask album – and what a great title, perhaps my favourite ever…’

The fact that One Day I Was So Sad… was distributed via United Dairies gave rise to rumours that Bladder Flask was NWW working under an assumed name. However, Stapleton was soon to set the record straight. Although certain similarities are obvious, Bladder Flask’s work was a lot less refined than NWW, ‘…a seemingly random mix of Dada, Free Improvisation and Musique Concrete – with a big dollop of absurdism thrown in for good measure, sounding at times as though The Goons had somehow gained control of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop!…’

In 1981 there were plans for a second Bladder Flask album to be issued on United Dairies but (for various reasons) the project was shelved.

With the 40th anniversary of the One Day I Was So Sad… LP, Richard Rupenus approached Steven Stapleton with a view to him remixing/reworking some Bladder Flask material, an invitation which Stapleton was happy to accept. However, rather than merely remixing/reworking existing Bladder Flask, Stapleton has created a brand new work which magnificently fuses both artists’ sense of the absurd.

Review by Freek Kinkelaar in Vital weekly : The late 70s and early 80s were amazing times for experimental music and DIY artistry. So much adventurous music found its way to eager listeners, quite a few of whom would become artists themselves. Truly fertile sound grounds. One of these adventurous records was the wonderfully titled ‘One Day I Was So Sad, The Corners Of My Mouth Met And Everybody Though I Was Whistling’ album by the equally wonderfully named Bladderflask. Behind the Bladder was, in fact, Richard Rupenus, who also appeared in Mixed Band Philanthropist with Nurse With Wound’s Steve Stapleton and The New Blockaders project. As you can tell, this was also a time when choosing a band name was a lot of fun. The bond between Stapleton and Rupenus provided the world a new version of The New Blockaders’ album Changez Les Blockeurs, when Stapleton released a cover of the whole album some years ago. In 2021, a surprise lathe cut album entitled Backside was released by United Diaries in an edition of 100 discs with handmade covers. The album was created by Stapleton, Rupenus and Andrew Liles, making good use of fragments of old Bladderflask-material courtesy of Rupenus. Featuring the tracks Backside and MDZhB (Chernobyl Picknick) the record sold out in the blink of an eye. To compensate potential listeners who missed out the opportunity (and the funds) to buy the lathe cut, its music has now been re-released with the 20-minute bonus track Backside (Cloud Chamber). So what is this rarely-head album all about? The opening track, Backside, is a more chaotic, unstructured affair with lots of concrete sounds-going-ons. As such, it is reminiscent of the original Bladderflask album and perhaps even Nurse With Wound’s debut with both projects sharing a similar outlook on abstract sound. MDZhB (Chernobyl Picknick), on the CD retitled Chernobyl Picknick, and Backside (Cloud Chamber) are far more ambient affairs. Here, we get proper doses of what The Nurse does so well: creepy atmospheres, lots of reverb, gloom, doom and room, with random sounds thrown in. It shares familiarity with the ambient waves of Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith, and do I recognize bits and pieces of the original Bladderflask album thrown in? I used to have that record decades ago, and listening to Backside makes me want to hear it again. With the considerable amount of music currently being released, it is perhaps more challenging to choose what is actually good and what can be neglected. A good drone is a horse’s bone to a dog and all that jazz. Personally, I consider Backside a very worthwhile release in the canon of both Bladderflask as Nurse With Wound. Plus, it comes a lot cheaper than the original art-edition lathe cut!