Nurse With Wound 'Opium Cabaret' CD
17.12.21
Contains the full Opium Cabaret album plus an additional 40 minutes previously unreleased studio material. Housed in deluxe full colour digipack with new art by Santini.
4 tracks, 74 minutes
Steven Stapleton, Andrew Liles & Colin Potter
1. Floating Body
2. Sleep Sweeping Down
3. Pigment Drift
4. Zonked
Tracks 3 & 4 reassembled by Colin Potter & mastered at IC Studio, London 2021
REVIEW OF THE ORIGINAL OPIUM ALBUM FROM DISCIPLINE MAGAZINE (No. 2 albums of the year):
Over two drone-afflicted tracks, this album harkens back to the moods explored and perfected in the drone masterpiece, Soliluquoy For Lilith. But rather than falling further down the endless spiral of Lilith, Opium Cabaret functions as a distorted simulation of a familiar experience.
The loud, colourful, and psychedelic album cover (with NWW’s signature collage work) seems fitting enough to represent a cabaret themed event. Although, a step inside reveals that the sounds present are a distant inebriated haze from any kind of conventional performance.
This is a record that moves in slow motion. It unfolds into a floating nothingness to appease broken minds so drenched in opiates, time and place are but frivolous footnotes in a wider narrative of distorted reality.
More than his other recent works, Stapleton’s latest effort hits a similar note to that of his ‘80s output. Speaking of this era, as the surviving acts from England’s esoteric underground of industrial stalwarts get fewer and fewer, the importance of new Nurse With Wound music cannot be understated.
Review from Boomkat :
Colin Potter presents a particularly intoxicating, expanded edition of the new NWW on his ICR label, flanked by Steven Stapleton & Andrew Liles in a proper aether-dream sequence of drones and phantasmic vapours.
Augmented with 40 minutes of extra material to the LP editions since 2020, ‘Opium Cabaret’ is arch NWW, comparable in its illusive, dematerialised make-up to some of NWW’s best, not least ’Soliloquoy for Lilith’. The album’s original two tracks are supplemented by an exclusive new pair of etheric investigations that extend the album’s pleasures with a fine grasp of opium’s putative pleasures that means one may want more, please, and gets it like double hit.
The original LP’s stygian flow of icy strings, subtly shivering digital delays and siren-like whispers from the void in ‘Floating Body’ follow to the restlessly febrile, gnawing digital tones and cavernous space evoked by ’Sleep Sweeping Down’ with the sort of masterful pacing and vision one might be led to expect form these legends.
‘Pigment Drift’ now renders the album’s pleasures deeper, more sensuous, with a synaesthetic play of colour-graded hues that trigger olfactory and strange proprioceptive responses from our side, before they enact the airborne roil of ‘Zonked’ with its slurred vox teased into slithering, Coil-adjacent psychoactivity and fathomless reverbs recalling Jay Glass Dubs’ actions.
