Graham Bowers and Nurse With Wound – Parade/Diploid

 Red Wharf

Only listened to this twice so far, but I must say its miles more entertaining than the previous Graham Bowers collaboration Rupture. Gone are the studious symphonics,  favourably replaced by liberating wonky oompha chip-chop that scatters the wares more psychsomatically without labouring any fixed point..

“Off to Hell on a Handcart” (seriously loving these track titles) is stereophonically awry, a slippery mess of Michael Jackson moonwalk on a blancmange pavement of pomposity. An erroneous comedy monkeying around with your cranium like old-fashioned ‘Wound used to, before everything got protracted and drone swept. There’s too much going on, not that I’m complaining, Mr Stapleton and company haven’t been this satisfyingly doodah since The Surveillance Lounge. A welcome return to form me thinks, as my head feels that it’s swimming in too much alcohol and that internal gyro is about to let things fly. The speakers are working the savage twists and huge swells of  bloated Thicke‘n ‘Pharrell over  Floyd‘s “Heart Beat Pig Meat.” Surfing those gooey choirs swallowed in monumental dronic croup and collapsed kola crushes whilst an airborne Mr Bowers spits notation like massive globs of multicoloured chewing tobacco.

The pleasures fly by, three tracks in and you’re suddenly immersed in some mighty fine piano insanity, a nailing techno that’s batshit crazy (I’m listening so loud the windows are quaking). A judder jaggered action sequence shuffled into the back of tomorrow fading on eerie rivers of cooling fat whilst the innards of piano wire play on ill winds. “Ring A’ring O’roses” is full of scribbled discordance, a weird shrill and squeaky gravy. The brass skirting round choral creepers and strange percussive indigestions. Old gramophone flavours coming and going to fluffy organisms on hospital trolley wheels; a feed-Baucus-aba-caustic-bizarre-ness fading to a lone whistling bin man. This should be on the education syllabus, it’s definitely on par with trying to read the other side of Ulysses or the unfathomable Flounder by Mr Grass (easy has never been on my agenda).

I’m really enjoying every single minute of this – as the violins and ominous swell of “A Tissue of Deceit” suddenly whips into a munster dance floor of loose scoops of ’30s crooner, cross wired with panel punching beats  and against the tide operatics. It’s a mess that almost doesn’t work, but it cusps that disgruntled frontier beautifully in mixed metaphors of interchanging texture, bedazzles you in abrupt swindle. The penultimate “Beyond the Palisade” is a curmudgeon of mental hammering to a Gilbert and Sullivan ribcage of BPM xylophonics. Punishing and ludicrous, leading to the worry beaded soundscape of “The Bitter End,” with its harmonic cloisters oozing away  on an orchestrated slow roast to nowhere.

The 20min bonus Diploid is an epilogue to Parade, a slow electroacoustic groping of piano wires and zithery misfirings of notation; a considered vibe that relishes in a restrained chaos blighted in rolling classical touches. Rising horns and twilight caresses. Dark Cage(ean) rumbas and siren calls from beyond, dancing textures between the left and right channels. Swollen beats, cutting off to a rising of rusty hinges and the creakiness of empty swings to a Mozart haze. Classic Nurse territory of scraping and tourniquet tightenings.  Berio floods of insecurity at odds with the jewellery box cuteness, liquifications of insects scuttling all over it  as decaying notes steam off into cul-de-sac(ean) recesses retiring on a piano viscera fade.

FAB-U-LOUS.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-