Nurse With Wound- Tape Monkey Mooch: Angry Eelectric Finger 1

Artist: Nurse With Wound and Jim O'Rourke
CD Title: Tape Monkey Mooch: Angry Eelectric Finger 1
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records
Reviewer: Matthew Johnson
Date: 1/11/05

This is the first disk in the “Angry Eelectric Finger” series, a set of collaborations wherein various artists create compositions using source material provided by Nurse With Wound’s Stephen Stapleton. Experimental composer Jim O’Rourke, who has worked with everyone from Sonic Youth to the Kronos Quartet, takes a fairly hands-off approach on his disk. The result is an album of two long compositions that emphasize Stapleton’s choice in sounds more than O’Rourke’s own approach. The first composition begins with soft chimes and analog drones that pan back and forth across the speakers. It’s pleasant at first, but gradually becomes more and more ominous and mechanical. The track segues several times between darker and softer moments before ending in feedback and what sounds like a barber’s scissors. The second track starts out with a more industrial feeling, with lots of static and occasional metal clanking, before flute and saxophone – supplied by Hansi Fischer and Tim Belbe of the legendary German psychedelic outfit Xhol Caravan – take things in a jazzier direction. Things get really gorgeous by the end of the piece, where slow discordant strings dominate, and despite warped tape loops, sampled screams, and weird rattling sounds, this is perhaps the most conventionally musical piece in the entire “Angry Eelectric Finger” series.

For more information on this and other Nurse With Wound projects, visit www.brainwashed.com/nww.