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NURSE WITH WOUND - Homotopy to Marie

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: United Jnana 366
Release Year: 2007
Note: re-release of the genius surrealistic masterpiece from 1982 (UD 013). digipack
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €15.00
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Das surrealistische NURSE-Meisterwerk von 1982, ein aurales Irrenhaus oder: die bestmögliche Annäherung ans Irrationale, Unbewusste, tabuisierte Triebhafte.. wie ein Logbuch von verdrängten Gedächtnisinhalten, unheimlich fremd und unheimlich faszinierend zugleich... endlich wieder erhältlich!

"Homotopy to Marie, originally released in 1982, was the fifth Nurse With Wound album. Steven Stapleton considers it to be the first "real" Nurse record as it was the first record he'd made without any intervention from his early partners. Its release also marked the point where Stapleton assumed the mantle of Nurse for all future releases.
Musically, Homotopy is a brilliant example of Stapleton's tape editing and manipulation, producing a disturbing avant-garde collage that remains a stunning listen! Homotopy has been out of print for a few years and appears now with newly designed artwork in a six-panel digipack. This issue has also corrected the misplaced track index points which marred previous CD reissues." [label info]

"FINALLY REISSUED!!! Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is our favorite. Perhaps because
this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within
Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism
as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermittently reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-descript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that
leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece." [Aquarius Records]


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