Nurse With Wound was formed as a solo enterprise by Steven Stapleton in 1978. The first release, the NWW list, was a record-sized insert in the United Kingdom magazine The ReR Quarterly (Volume 1
Nurse With Wound, a project of composer Steven Stapleton, was formed in England in 1979 when Stapleton and John Fothergill attempted to make a noise recording. The result was “The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion,” which featured the sounds of the band’s pet parrots. Not satisfied with the results, Stapleton continued to work on his own, eventually releasing “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.” The album consisted of two 16-minute tracks of sound effects and white noise. After releasing four singles on United Dairies Records, Stapleton released his first studio album as Nurse With Wound, “To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl,” which is made up almost entirely of spoken word material by Stapleton’s friend Heman Pathak.
Nurse With Wound releases are thematically connected by their surrealistic cover artwork and extensive liner notes that are often printed in black ink over black paper. In addition to Pathak’s contributions, Nurse With Wound has frequently collaborated with other artists including David Tibet (of Current 93), Jim O’Rourke, Graham Bowers and Diana Rogerson (of Current 93). NWW has also rem
Nurse With Wound are a British experimental music group, working since 1978. Formed by Steven Stapleton and John Fothergill, the band has employed many collaborators over the years, most notably David Tibet of Current 93. The band is among the most prominent in the industrial, noise and avant-garde genres.
The name originates from an askew description on a list of song titles by the Australian band Crash Worship.
The band’s earliest output was industrial music in the vein of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse. This line-up did not play live; Nurse With Wound’s first live performance was 15 July 1979 at The Arts Lab, London. The concert featured Stapleton, John Fothergill and Steve Moore (of Unpriest) on synthesiser, with masks, costumes and props to create a phantasmagorical atmosphere.
The “studio” line-up remained stable until 1980 when Andrew Liles joined (playing guitar), followed shortly thereafter by Robert Haigh (on synthesizer). In 1982 they released their debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella to considerable critical acclaim. This record was an early example of what
Nurse With Wound is a British musical group formed in 1978, originally as a duo of Steven Stapleton and John Fothergill.[1] The group is “one of the most prolific and celebrated avant-garde recording artists of their era.”[2]
Nurse With Wound was formed by Stapleton in order to get out of playing live. He realized that he could make more money selling cassettes than records, so he began to put out limited edition albums. In 1979, Nurse With Wound released their first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.[3]
The album was based on an earlier recording made by David Jackman (of Organum) and Stapleton, titled Homotopy to Marie. This album was created with the intention of being played at random, with no beginning or end to each track. Stapleton released the album under the name of Nurse With Wound because he believed it sounded “like a band that would make this sort of music.”[4]
The cover art for Chance Meeting is taken from an illustration in Traite des Decoupages by Henri Matisse.[5]
Nurse With Wound has had many members over
Nurse With Wound is the name of a British experimental music project. The name comes from the song “Nurse With Wound” on side two of International Artists’ record by United States of America.
The project was formed in 1978 by Steven Stapleton and John Fothergill with the release of their first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. An embryonic version of this album had been recorded under the group name “Human Head Transplant”. Nurse With Wound expanded to include David Tibet (of Current 93) for their second album To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl. This was followed by Merzbild Schwet. David Tibet left soon after.
One of the albums most renowned tracks, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Station” was included on the legendary compilation Now That’s What I Call Music: Industrially Sound (1982; Fruit Records).
“Early electronic music” is a phrase used to describe the first compositions that used electronics in their composition. It had become possible to directly generate sound electronically, and this was widely used in new compositions. There have been many articles written discussing the concept, which has led to a lot of disagreement on where exactly the style of music began. The history of early electronic music can be traced back as far as the late 19th century when French composer Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville pioneered sound recording. His phonautograph was an early method for recording musical sound by drawing variations of air pressure onto paper, although it could not record sound.
Early electronic music was created by composers experimenting with new technology, and some of these composers were: Aaron Copland (1942), Edgar Varese (1954), Halim El-Dabh (1944), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1954), Nicolas Slonimsky (1950), Milton Babbitt (1957), Luigi Russolo (1913) , Iannis Xenakis (1958) , John Cage (1939-42), John White (1950’s) and Edgard Varèse(1936).
The first electronic musical instrument was the Theremin, invented in 1920 by a Russian named Lev Termen (in the U.S., Leon Theremin). It was played without being touched: it had a vertical antenna for volume and a horizontal one for pitch. It was hard to play; to get both hands in the right place at once you had to be looking at them, and if you were looking at your hands you weren’t watching what you were playing.
The most famous early player of the Theremin was Clara Rockmore, who is said to have been able to play any violin piece on it. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that anyone really figured out how to make electronic music sound good.
The breakthrough came when someone figured out that you could use two tape recorders and speed up or slow down one while they were playing against each other. The effect is that the pitch goes up or down, and also that the sound gets thinner or richer as it slows down or speeds up. By this means you could produce melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and timbres that would have been impossible otherwise.
The man who did this first was Pierre Schaeffer, working in Paris in 1948. He was a radio technician rather than a composer;