Nurse With Wound

Rock 'n Roll Station

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Boomkat Product Review:

Very necessary reissue of NWW’s industrial hypno-mambo trip, riddled with proper studio alchemy by Colin Potter, and newly expanded with alternate remix of ‘Subterranean Zappa Blues’. A massive RIYL Pan Sonic/Liima, Muslimgauze, Danny Hyde/Coil, Toresch.

Recognised as Nurse With Wound’s most rhythm-driven outing, ‘Rock ’n Roll Station’ is a swaggering head full of avant rock that renders a warped studio dialogue between Steven Stapleton and his studio spar Colin Potter, who regards the album as his favourite work with the legendary group.

The album came about as Stapleton and Potter returned to the work on ‘Colder Still’ from their first meeting, 1992’s ‘Thunder Perfect Mind’. With extra percussion, instruments, loops and studio animated magick, they mutated its selection of dry but sexy, swivelling grooves and pranging psychedelic touches into a bizarre and steeply hypnotic hour of music that distilled the spirits of the King of Mambo, Pérez Prado, ‘60s British R&B organist Graham Bond, and Gallic avant rock star Jac Berrocal in a grinding, rhythmic style that ran perpendicular to all that as much as the electronic dance music at the time with which it was erroneously, contemporaneously compared.

As Stapleton explained in 1995: "This album arrived somewhere after a dream meeting of several individuals, Graham Bond, Joe Meek, Jacques Berrocal and myself. After a few beers and a heated discussion of puncture repair we all lay down in a circle and point our penises at Venus, telepathic messages are sent out to Colin saying he can use the two golden microphones. He did, and here we are."

And here we are 26 years later, and ‘Rock ’N Roll Station’ is still beaming some of the most influential gear in its strange, nether field, running the kind of drily motorik, dubwise mechaniks that would later turn up in Pan Sonic and their killer solo works as Ø and Liima, and is surely paralleled in Danny Hyde’s work for Coil - with Hyde perhaps being the best analog for Potter’s role in NWW; an integral, if unquantifiable entity whose engineering really helps these classic works endure long beyond their conception, as he explained it to David Keenan in England’s Hidden Reverse: “What I sometimes did in the studio was to ‘over-use’ effects and processors to totally mutate a piece into something completely different”. Trust the results are staggering and not to be missed!