It’s been a while since I’ve posted here: partly from my being too busy, but also just another one of my periodic lapses from contact with the outside world. The previous few months have mostly been occupied with completing a new Nurse With Wound album with Steve Stapleton, which we’ve constructed out of extracts from the archive of live recordings I’ve been amassing for the past 10 years. It’s not a selection of live ‘highlights’ or anything like that, but an entirely new record built by combining some of the most interesting moments into unique new tracks. As I’m the one in the group that records everything — shows, soundchecks, rehearsals, off-stage events — it naturally fell to me to sort through and find elements that could work together. The project took longer than expected since it kept expanding as we went along: it was first planned as a single vinyl release, then an extended CD version was proposed, then an entire second disc was added, and then Steve decided he wanted to do a collaborative art edition — and we are now just wrapping up that final aspect of it.

On a related note, an expanded, double-disc reissue of the classic NWW album ‘Sylvie & Babs‘ was recently released by United Dirter, and I was fortunate to be able to contribute a variety of things to it: clean-up and mastering of all the different S&B-related cassette compilations tracks, a brand new track of my own in the S&B collage style, and a new graphic that’s been used for the cover of the inner booklet. It’s astonishing to think back to how much I loved that album when I first bought it over twenty years ago, and to now find myself involved in a version of it. If you’re on the east side of the Atlantic, you can get a copy at the new NWW shop: www.nursewithwound.co.uk. I only have five copies on hand to sell myself: not enough to warrant creating a listing in the shop, but if you’re in the States and would like to get one and save some pricey overseas postage, drop me a note at irrappext (at) gmail.com and I’ll let you know if I still have any left (and I’ll put up a short post to announce when they’re gone). I’ll be selling my copies for $20 each + postage (probably about $4 Media Mail).

But the principal reason for this new post is to announce the release of the new irr. album Matériaux Déplacés. This is a expanded, double-disc version of the small-edition cassette released by the now-defunct ReadyMades Tapes label back in April. A full description of the album can be found on the item page, but, briefly, the original two 15-minute tracks from the cassette are now combined with several more tracks from the NDAS archives which were constructed using a similar approach, and linked with a series of short excerpts of varied location recordings and upright piano manipulation (similar sources having been an important part of those two original tracks). This release is limited to only 120 copies, as I suspect it will have a more limited appeal. You can grab a copy here.

A lot of other things are in the works: a second collaboration with Pentti Dassum’s Umpio project (which has only been held up by me trying to finish all the stuff listed above); a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for the very slow-progressing collaboration with French pianist Sylvie Walder (all the tracks are now finished, and only the packaging needs to be sorted out); a bit more progress made in restoring the unreleased second irr. album from 1998 ‘Foreign Matter, Nor Frequency Carrier’; and a similarly long-in-preparation and exhaustively comprehensive online irr. discography (to balance out the jumble of faulty information available elsewhere). Some printed graphic collections with accompanying audio are in the planning stages, with the hopes that these might act as a remedy to the ever-plummeting record sales.

One final note: Nurse With Wound peformances in Bratislava (November 26th) and London (December 5th) are in the process of being sorted out, and I should be present for both of them. Travel arrangements have not yet been finalised, however, so nothing can be said with absolute certainty quite yet.

–msw