Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1980)

Rating: 8.2

Nurse With Wound (brainchild of Steven Stapleton) is a semi-legendary band that has traversed a multitude of genres (including but not limited to: industrial, ambient, drone, and krautrock) and helped advance techniques of tape manipulation. Not only that, but Stapleton’s band is known for the infamous Nurse With Wound list, a list of the bands that influenced Nurse With Wound (many of them rare and highly obscure). For many, this list serves as a buying guide, especially for those who want to own a CD from every artist on the list.

I don’t know anywhere close to all of Nurse With Wound’s output, but what I do know, I love. Whether it’s the eerie minimalism of Homotopy to Marie (often seen as Stapleton’s magnum opus), the tranquil yet evocative drones of Soliloquy to Lilith, or the all over the map A Sucked Orange (a collection of material from most of the band’s eras), Nurse With Wound seems incapable of disappointing me (well, the album Crocodile Crazy Glue is rather unimpressive in my view, but that’s it). Thankfully, this trend holds true for their debut CD, the strangely titled Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (hereby known just as Chance Meeting).

Sadly, Steven Stapleton doesn’t consider this CD (or any before Homotopy to Marie to be a proper Nurse With Wound CD. At this point, Nurse With Wound was actually a band (with multiple members), rather than the name for Steven Stapleton’s solo work. I really don’t care what Stapleton thinks, however, as this is an incredible CD, one of the best industrial records you will ever hear. This music is timeless, and one of the definitive pieces of evidence that the eighties were actually quite rich musically, if only one cares to scratch below the surface of what was popular at the time.

With only three songs, Chance Meeting’s running time is surprisingly long (nearing fifty minutes), but most of those fifty are well spent. Look at the second track, “The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal,” if you need proof. Clocking in at roughly thirteen minutes, “The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal” contains crazed guitar screeches, burst of electronic noise, and a muffled drum beat the holds it all together. While certainly not structured in any conventional way, this song still has a sense of form that keeps it cohesive and interesting and makes it the standout of the CD. That’s not to say the rest is weak, however. While the first song seems somewhat inconsequential next to the other two, it’s certainly not bad, and “Blank Capsule of Embroidered Cellophane” is an absolute monster of a track if there ever was one. While not every idea contained in its twenty-nine minutes works, most of them do, and those that do work work exceedingly well.

Unfortunately, this CD is out of print and will probably cost you $35 (or more) to buy, so I can really only recommend it to those who already know and love Nurse With Wound or are fans of industrial music. For those who want to discover Nurse With Wound, start with the far more readily available A Sucked Orange. This album is certainly very good, another one of those lost masterpieces. While not a full masterpiece in its own right, it’s still well worth owning for fans of music that’s “out there.”

I rate it with a B+ (excellent).




And since it's OOP:

Chance Meeting...