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Nurse With Wound 'Rock & Roll Station'' 2LP

£23.00

 **BACK IN STOCK**

A DLP reissue of this classic NWW album which has been unavailable on vinyl for a long, long time. Released by our friends at Abstrakce, housed in their usual high quality beautiful letterpress sleeve. Includes an unreleased alternate mix of “Subterranean Zappa Blues”.

“This album arrived somewhere after a dream meeting of several individuals, Graham Bond, Joe Meek, Jacques Berrocal and myself. After a few beers and a heated disscussion of puncture repair we all lay down in a circle and point our penises at Venus, telepathic messages are sent out to Colin saying he can use the two golden microphones. He did, and here we are.” Steven Stapleton, 17.1.94.

Rock ‘n Roll Station began life with Steven Stapleton asking engineer Colin Potter to remix some of the more rhythmic elements of ‘Colder Still’ from 1992’s Thunder Perfect Mind. As Potter gradually warped these sections into weirder and weirder pieces, a new album began to emerge. Potter himself explained it to David Keenan in England’s Hidden Reverse: “What I sometimes did in the studio was to ‘over-use’ effects and processors to totally mutate a piece into something completely different” while Stapleton observed how “it was almost as though telepathic messages were sent over to Colin. [We’d] started an album [together at IC Studio] that was never finished. He [then] sent me some vague mixes, which were just what I had in mind. So, from that basis, I started putting the album together.”

Review bu Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly :

Originally 'Rock N Roll Station' was a CD from 1994, about twelve years after that released on CD and double LP by Beta-Lactam Ring Records and now again as a double LP. This one comes with an OBI in letterpress print and same for the insert. Back then, 'Rock 'N Roll Station' was quite a shock. We knew the nUrses spread their music wide but the 4/4/ beat of the title track was quite a surprise. 'I made a house record', head nurse Stapleton said, but of course, not all with a 4/4 beat is a house record. The reciting text and sounds swirling in and out of the mix doesn't exactly
shuffle feet across the floor. But the whole use of rhythm on this album is surely something that is inspired by dance music. The tribalistic drumming in 'Two Golden Microphones' for instance, along with didgeridoo is quite hypnotic; the voice of Chrystal Belle Scrodd is the reminder that this is indeed Nurse With Wound. In 'The Self Sufficient Sexual Shoe' there is even a drum machine, which I guess is something of a rarity in the world of Nurse With Wound. Overall, the use of rhythm works quite well here; it hammers away, exotic, minimal, strange, 'house' (you don't have to call it that) and within the studio band that Nurse With Wound is, there is a lot of room to add all these little sounds and effects. It is easier to say this is a dub record than a house record, if you catch my drift. The space they create is filled with echo, reverb, and lots of other treatments of sounds, voices, guitars, best exemplified on 'A Silhouette And A Thumbtack (Dance in Hyperspace)'. It makes this very much a Nurse With Wound record, the studio-as-instrument approach works once again like clockwork. This re-issue contains one track, a different version of ' Subterranean Zappa Blues (Alternate Mix)', so completists should take notice.

Potter would quickly become a key player in Nurse With Wound’s productions, a position he continues to fulfil to this day. He was first credited as a member on 1992’s Thunder Perfect Mind, a tour-de-force of cold, at times hostile, machined atmospheres, but considers Rock ‘N Roll Station from the following year to still be his favourite.

Building on percussion and drone elements, Stapleton and Potter throw in a huge range of bizarre and atmospheric elements: didgeridoos, chanting voices, and their usual selection of unidentifiable sounds.

Its strong focus on rhythm was erroneously surmised by some as an attempt to join the then rising electronic dance music scene. But it was Stapleton’s recent obsession with the music of ‘King of the Mambo’ Pérez Prado that was beating at the heart of Rock N’ Roll Station’s heady rhythms.

The album’s title alluded to two specifically rock-related stations of influence: the song of the same name by Jac Berrocal, of which a surprisingly straight cover opens the album in homage; and the tragic life of the Sixties British R&B organist Graham Bond who influenced bands such as Deep Purple and Cream. Beset by mental health problems (at one point believing he was the son of Aleister Crowley), Bond died under a train at a Tube station in 1989 and it is this tragic scene that Rock ‘n Roll Station’s closing track, ‘Finsbury Park, May 8th, 1:35 PM (I’ll See You In Another World)’, sets in sound.

 


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