NURSE WITH WOUND / The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985)

Neither Sylvie, Babs nor Murray Fontana are on the album; nor any of the songs advertised on the front. It's NWW taking the joke contained within and extending it to the packaging. Stapleton has been quoted as saying he wanted to make a record "that was stolen from other people's records," so he did. He does the same thing with stolen clips that he usually does with his own; i.e. create a collage of sound that's neither music nor non-music, but something in-between.
Many of the sounds are culled from easy listening records from the 50s and 60s, interspersed with snippets of dialogue and various man-made sounds.
NWW albums always ride a fine line between irritating and art; Sylvie and Babs veers into the irritating more than usual, in my opinion.

Songs of Note: You Walrus Hurt the One You Love; Great Balls of Fur

1½ warning shots out of 5

NURSE WITH WOUND / A Handjob from the Laughing Policeman (2006)

Handjob is a one track release (forty-four minutes) from the 'purveyors of sinister whimsy to the wretched,' NWW. It has Stephen Stapleton joined by Colin Potter, who together offer up a kind of remix of 'Shipwrecked Radio' outtakes, with various oddities from their past collaborations. It starts slow but gathers momentum with a great loop based tribal rhythm. The latter half slows down once more to a familiar kind of ambient drone. It was limited to 300 copies, but you can bag it from the official bandcamp page in exchange for some currency. With over eighty albums in the NWW discography, it can be hard to know which, if any, are worth your time. This isn't their best work, but not their worst either.

Song of Note: A Handjob from the Laughing Policeman

3 void echoes out of 5

NURSE WITH WOUND / A Sucked Orange (1990)

A collection of audio clippings, unused oddities and leftovers from the NWW discography from 1979-88. With twenty-nine tracks totalling over fifty minutes of NWW music/sampling/weirdness, it's a very mixed bag. Some are ambient (Spiral Theme) and some are brain melting (Rockette Morton). Each one creates a specific atmosphere for a brief time before being shuffled aside to make way for something new. It's like opening twenty-nine different doors in Steven Stapleton's mind and witnessing twenty-nine different aspects of his psyche. Needless to say, it's not for the uninitiated.

Songs of Note: I'm a Frayed Knot; This Piano Can't Think

3 games with scissors out of 5

NURSE WITH WOUND / Creakiness and Other Misdemeanours (2012)

A new Nurse With Wound album always excites me (and about four other people in the world). Although Creakiness isn't exactly new material, it's the Creakiness side of the NWW/Spasm split vinyl LP Creakiness/Firepool (1991), along with various other tracks culled from long out of print 7" singles. It's the usual acid flashback music that makes you want to separate your consciousness from your scumbag brain and float it over a volcano. Be thrilled by car horns, cat meows, creaking doors, porky pig, fake duck calls, roundabouts and scratchy silence.

Songs of Note: Creakiness (all seventeen glorious minutes of it)

3½ meep meeps out of 5