Steven Stapleton & co. once released a record called Rock 'N Roll Station. Cut-up, collaged, offering his own unique slant on the hoary genre chestnut, it remains the head Nurse's most "accessible" album, though the word "accessible" doesn't immediately spring to mind when discussing Nurse with Wound music. The Surveillance Lounge sure as hell ain't rock. One of the more unsettling listening experiences to hit your eardrums in quite a while, uncertainty reigns supreme in attempting to catalog what Surveillance even is. Awry soundscape? Grand guignol faux-opera? Mythic muses from a Lovecraftian land of the old ones? All this and more, actually, though the simple fact is that Nurse with Wound music is stubbornly Nurse with Wound music. A typical recording looks, feels, and sounds like nothing else around — full of a completely alien cadence and sonic design, incorporeal at moments, profound at others, Stapleton's place in experimental music's corpus is unparalleled, uncontested, unrestrained.
Surveillance, to put it bluntly, is some scary shit. This isn't your mind on drugs — this is your mind put through some inter-dimensional blender, your psyche stripped bare, remixed, and recalibrated into a sentience wholly unlike anything, well, normal. NWW are unabashed surrealists, maybe the epitome of the term rendered in "musical" form. The opening "Close to You" is like an episodic tour through a twilight zone of disembodied voices, crashing glass, demonic arias erupting out of ectoplasmic cocoons, Stapleton and cohort Andrew Liles breaching the outer limits of their imaginations, molesting our sensibilities in the process. Attach whatever metaphors you like to "The Golden Age of Telekinesis", as signposts will not be forthcoming from the Nurses — all bets are off, parameters become meaningless and irrelevant. What emerges: deepcore interstellar howls/pulses, insects scuttling on beds of pine needles, poltergeists flittering about, someone striking an endless series of matches. Here is cinema writ aural, but what visual grotesqueries could this accompany save a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape?
If you can traverse this treacherous domain, and reach the summit that is "Yon Assassin is My Equal", you will have bridged a veritable atlas of conscious and semiconscious states, kept vigil at rituals sanctioned by extraterrestrials, and essentially felt like you dreamed during the process. Amid strange bubblings, whispering ingénues, Martian winds, sepulchral tones and the whimper of whipped dogs, Nurse's Stapleton and Liles demonstrate a sensate ability to so actualize their fevered imaginations that you're left gasping for air, caught firmly in their grasp. One of 2009's most inventive records, and that's saying something considering the complex physiognomy Nurse with Wound have birthed over their now 30-plus year history.
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