The Nurse With Wound List
Iñigo Martinez de Rituerto walks you through the influences of the weirdest band ever
1979 holds the key to the farthest reaches of musical conception. That year, Nurse With Wound released their debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Their music is the aural equivalent to the paintings of Salvador Dalí, stretching the mind and questioning reality. The surrealistic instrumentation and Dadaist approach are an amalgam of some of the strangest music of modern times. Tucked into the vinyl gatefold, the revered NWW List payed homage to their influences and bore the wonder for others to discover.
From Henri Chopin to Karlheinz Stockhausen, through the Velvet Underground and into Tangerine Dream, the list spans and pulls together the most unlikely of artists. Dabbling in psychedelics and staggering with no-wave drawl, rolling the rocks in one ear and out the other.
The list pays its respects to a horde of homegrown freethinkers and experimentalists such as industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle and freakfolk gem Comus. Among other London-based groups appear AMM, pioneers of free-improvisation, whose founding member Eddie Prévost can be found on Sunday nights holding improvisation workshops in the basement of a chapel in Borough.
One of the most influential bands on the list is Essex-based anarcho-punks Crass, who cemented the conscientious and passionate cornerstones of the punk mind, burning in the grasp of Thatcherism. Taking up camp in the Dial House commune in the Essex countryside, they nurtured a creative environment for free expression, which still exists today and is documented in the film There is No Authority but Yourself.
Strongly represented is the psychedelic krautrock movement which sprouted in Germany at the end of the 60’s in response to the summer of love. Noting the seminal meanderings of Can, commune jam band Amon Düül and of course one of the biggest influences on modern electronic music, Kraftwerk.
John Cage makes an appearance as well as Greek architect-turned-composer Iannis Xenakis, who used the mathematics of chance and architecture in many of his works. Avant garde guitarist Fred Frith is also mentioned alongside Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.
The list is a colourful display of originality and with bands such as The Deep FreezeMice or Lemon Kittens, sometimes it’s worth reading for the names alone. For the curious ear, it is a mere chip of the cookie and a musical map towards deeper horizons.
