VARIOUS ARTISTS
Strain, Crack And Break: The Nurse With Wound List FindeRs KeepeRs
Revolutionary sounds from 70s France selected by Nurse With Wound.
The Nurse With Wound list is legendary in both avant music and record collecting circles. When NWW released their debut album of industrial psychedelia in 1979, they included on the back a list of 291 bands and artists to create a context for the uncompromising music they were making – based on years of record hunting in continental Europe, many of the names were incredibly obscure at the time, and some are still rumoured to be just a figment of NWW’s imagination.
But now, Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label and NWW’s Steven Stapleton have committed to a series of country-specific compilations to throw some light on exactly which songs were being alluded to on that list. First up is France – as Votel puts it, “Where the Seine meets the insane, the space cadets that found Mars in Marseilles.”
It’s fair to say that in the AngloAmerican-focused 70s, France barely registered as a musical force beyond Jean-Michel Jarre, Sacha Distel and a couple of disco tracks – even Magma were strictly cult. Yet in a country still gripped by revolutionary zeal, experimentation in the margins was rife, with new strains of avant and progressive rock rubbing up against musique concrète and free jazz. It’s why Magma – who aren’t featured on this collection, but whose influence is apparent – had to invent the term ‘Zeuhl’ to describe this new music.
A strong sense of the dramatic permeates many of these tracks – Jacques Thollot’s Cécile sounds like a poltergeist rifling through an attic, the drones and wails of Philipp Besombes’ La Plage could be from Berberian Sound Studio, and Etron Fou Leloublan’s Les Désastreux Voyage Du Piteux Python is a carnivalesque performance piece.
But there’s astonishing music here too: the supernatural chanson mambo of Mahjun’s Les Enfants Sauvages; the taut, spy movie funk of Lard Free’s Warinobaril; the ethnographic jazz rock of Horrific Child’s Freyeur; and most impressive of all, the driving, 16-minute cosmic skronk of Red Noise’s Sarcelles C’est L’Aveni.