Been absolutely ADORING Nurse With Wound's 'Soliloquy for Lilith.' Before you ask, no I haven't given up on Garridge. I just found a copy on vinyl this weekend. Gleefully showed the purchase to a friend who nearly stymied my enthusiasm for it before I'd even had the chance to listen to the darned thing. Actually it was a bit of a punt; I've recently found that 'Homotopie for Marie' one too, and was pretty underwhelmed. The first reason being that many of the supposedly alienating 'super obscure' samples on it were from ethnographic records I own, plus actually I don't like composers making things 'dark' by using Third World samples. Not that these samples made up the bulk of the record, but what was left wasn't that enticing. Added to which NWW's debut LP, the one with the list of obscure records on the back is absolute rubbish (didn't Stapleton confess as much too?); the chances of this one excelling had to be pretty remote.*
But joy! It's completely superb! It's six sides of slow rotating drones are more like super oilagenous drum-less grooves, reminiscent of, amongst other things the B-side of Basic Channel's 6th record and Thomas Koner's 'Permafrost.' NWW's vision is much grander however (love writing reviews for these old records!) his is a very organic Minimalism, you COULD see it as existing in quite stark contrast with the ferocious Modernism of Phillip Glass's 'Music for Changing Parts', Jon Gibson's 'Two Solo Pieces', Charlemagne Palestine's 'Strumming Music', La Monte Young 'Black Record' etc, except that (and people seem to have forgotten this) Minimalism was essentially extremely baroque, opiated and suffused with influence from Indian classical, Plainchant and Tribal music (the latter is cheesy term I know, but encapsulates the community aspect of Third World music as well as it's geography). That's part of the problem with the austere reading of Modernist culture at the moment, it fails to tease out, to acknowledge the richness of the culture. All the Maths and Science was then in effect often as a result of occult number theory (La Monte/Catherine Christer Hennix) or out of a fetishism for ancient culture (Xenakis), not simply for it's qualities of abstraction. Off the top of my head I can only think of Roland Kahn and Charles Dodge who were pimping the Maths for purely mechanistic effects.
This is handy too, because it enables us to see Stapleton, not as an inferior copyist but as someone ploughing his own rich groove. Listening to the record super loud I discovered the staircase in my my study throbbing in time to it's ultra-bass tones. That makes me well keen to hear his 'Marie Celeste' record another exercise in atmosphere; all those creaking timbers. Sadly 'Soliloquy for Lilith' doesn't appear to widely available any more, I couldn't find the CD, though I'm sure some dude will straighten me out.
*Though natch the Stereolab 'Simple Headphone Mind' collaboration rocks.
Posted by Woebot at July 12, 2004 10:52 AM