Ether 07
Queen Elizabeth Hall
London
3rd March 2007
Christoph Heeman opens proceedings as special guest at the debut London performance of Nurse With Wound as part of the Ether 07 festival. His solo presence onstage, lit by sweeping blue light projections, is not the most engaging of performances visually, but the drones and surges of electronic tones he coaxes from a small assortment of devices soon swell up to fill the auditorium. While there is a reasonable amount of truth to the assertion made by some members of the audience afterwards that the minimalist sounds Heeman was generating were no longer the most original, he is someone who was – and arguably remains – an innovator in deep listening sounds of this sort, and kudos is due to Heeman for his role in making amelodic music swim beyond the mere lounge sounds of Ambient and into the rich depths of venue-filling presence.
Nurse With Wound should be a different kettle of surrealist fish – and there is a whale and a toy sailor to be seen perched among the lengthy table-load of gear they stretch a goodly part of the full width of the broad stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Having hosted their peers Current 93 and Coil, it’s only right and proper that the South Bank Centre should bring NWW to a live audience in the capital at last. As with the first Coil show here in 2000, there is an atmosphere of expectation – perhaps tinged with trepidation – on the part of many in the audience who had missed the Nurse With Wound shows in Preston (albeit not under that name) and at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in recent years that this most eccentric and eclectic of the (former) World Serpent roster could create an effective live performance.
To some extent, the first section of the show turns out to be less experimental than might be expected, taking up the drones left almost palpably hanging by Heeman and expanding on them without pushing the envelope much further. Steven Stapleton wanders from prepared bowed guitar to sundry bits of musical kit while Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron do similar duty at the other end of the table. Percussionist Marcus Ripley clatters and scrapes an alarmingly tall array of drums and gongs, while Colin Potter draws everything into something approaching coherence at his multifariously-appointed mixing desk in the centre, darting sharp glances at the musicians at any hint of feedback like a bespectacle lecturer keeping hawk-like alertness for anything which disturbs the totality of the unveiling sound. Thankfully, given Nurse With Wound’s avant-garde credentials as well as their experimental reputation, the odd stab of feedback doesn’t actually go amiss and fits into the semi-improvised structure quite well on occasion.
The continuing show picks up an element of dramtic fervour when David Tibet sneaks himself onto a darkening stage as the rolling projection of layered digital surrealism above the ensemble keeps the focal point of the show moving along to accompany the steadily more and more weird music NWW generate onstage. With his voice passed through some seriously warped effects, Tibet’s first number brings a sense of (admittedly alienated) human contact and presence to what is shaping into an otherwise strong but not yet overwhelming performance. One of the unfortunate side effects of putting music as potentially outré as this on the stage of the all-seated, hushed environs of the QEH is a certain amount of sterilisation which occurs to any sense of drama, pasteurising the more bacterial sounds and sensations cultured in the NWW petrie dish and inoculating to some degree what could have been an unnerving, or at least highly surreal, event. However, Matt Waldron does his best to provide a sometimes uncanny, frequently tricksterish element, and he whacks himself on the head with maracas, manipulates a variety of light-emitting toys or miked-up ball bearings and even dons a gas mask with tone-producing tube in proper Musique Concrèt fashion. The serious tone of the night is undermined delightfully though when Matt Waldron sings a Blues number in a rich baritone before seguing into a medly which includes the opening verse of Sheena Easton‘s “9 To 5”, and it’s around then that the show really starts to pick up, if not always with complete success.
Tibet makes a barefoot return, stalking in possessed Bushi style to the stage to sing – some might even say rap – the words for a funked-up version of “Two Shaves And A Shine”, Waldron plugging away on bass guitar as the group kick into a rhythmic groove which still feels somewhat constrained by the environment. The last section of the show is a forty minute-plus version of the creakily nautical “Salt Marie Celeste”, built on a repeated sample of the sound of a wooden ship straining its beams. NWW eventually construct the long-awaited climactic layers of hypnotic, overarching loops and unnerving sounds around the creaks in a passage which takes full advantage of the hall’s superb sound system, percussive beats slapping around the air above the audience in waves of gripping intensity as patterns of green and blue light ripple on the walls and ceiling in suitably aquatic fashion.
Nurse With Wound receive a standing ovation, a tribute which is well-deserved given their longevity and persistence of skewed vision. While tonight’s performance was maybe not as weird throughout as might have been hoped, it ws still a superb London début and one which deserves refinement, and repeating. The audience flock out in time to catch a lunar eclipse reflecting off the waters of the Thames, perhaps finding themselves angled a little more laterally by the singular sounds of Steven Stapleton and his big avant band to the heart of a city bathed under the light of a blood red moon.
-Richard Fontenoy-
