Nurse With Wound List #3: Come

Oof.

Wait. I think I remember MLA format for this:

"Oof." [Contraceptron, Steve. "Listening To Come's Rampton A Bunch Of Fucking Times: Managing Your Desire To Listen To Something Else." Listening To NWW List Garbage. My House, New Windsor. 19 April, 2014. Boredom.]

I think we can all agree that didn't add anything to the post.

As Nelson Mandela taught us, we must embody a certain fluidity in our posturing, and allow ourselves the space to negotiate even in the face of our most virulent and unyielding opponents. Simultaneously, we must ensure that the establishment of consent amongst parties is weighted by an understanding of the context and conditions of these negotiations, lest insurrection occurs. In the case at hand, the conditions described were tragically unmet, and under a law of such myopic tyranny as the internally imposed "I Need To Listen To Every Album At Least 3 Times Before I Review It" principle, violence erupted. With hindsight as my guide, I could posit that my rigidity and ignorance during the establishment of such stipulations could only be met with me listening to this shitty album like 4 times even though I totally hated it after the first time and then getting really bored and annoyed with myself. I dunno, fuck you this album blows.
I've kind of always liked buying into the zAnY mythologies of "legendary", "crucial", "groundbreaking" "slabs" of "historical importance", mostly because it's fun to get excited over stupid shit like "lost" records and super obscure record collector junk. In this case, Come's Rampton LP/CS is pretty rare and sought after for being the predecessor to Whitehouse and You're Interrupting Me Scraping Foetus Off The Incorporated Symphony Of Corruption (or whatever words surround "Foetus" this week), and I was really excited about hearing this. But then I listened to it a few times and... wrote that stupid opening paragraph.
Come is made up of William Bennett, J.G. Thirlwell (under some pseudonym), Peter McKay, and Daniel Miller (also under some pseudonyms), and is pretty much what you'd expect from such subversive, visionary deconstructionists of polite Western civilization when they were, like, twenty year old kids. It's basically just some rudimentary "industrial" fuzz guitar, a bloopy synth bass of hilariousness, and Bennett making funny "whooOoooEeeeEHhheeeee" noises on top. If I had to describe the vocals, I'd probably put them somewhere between leprechaun surface noise (like if a leprechaun was giggling and brogue-ing 30 feet away and you were recording it. And then played it through an echo pedal) and someone babytalking to a cat they like to an uncomfortable degree. I always kinda liked Bennett's vocals in early Whitehouse, 'cause they provided a human counterweight to all the screeching, pointless machinations going on, but here I'm not really sure what the intended effect was. They're definitely not an interesting foil to the high school basement post-punk riffs, anyway.
For a second I was having one of those thoughts that seemingly everyone who explores the NWW list (ie 'why is _____ on the list but not _______?') (though seriously where the fuck is Sun Ra) but then I saw the cover of the LP version and it kinda made sense:

I mean, that's totally Stapleton's art, right? And he did put Whitehouse in the To The Quiet Men... list, too, and they did do that pretty solid collaboration with Bennett as The 150 Murderous Passions a few years later. Were they buddies way back in '79? I guess I could figure this out with ten seconds of internet browsing, but I also wanna go make dinner right now.
Come apparently have a second LP called I'm Jack (whose cover might be the second of three gajillion Bennett-related releases to feature Peter Kurten), and apparently it's more in the drone/noise vein, comparatively, and is a bit more prescient than this shit. I haven't heard it yet, but I'll be sure to update this once I do with the EXCITING CONCLUSION.

Also, I can't embed Come videos here for some reason, but if you'd like to hear this shit for yourself, here's a great link for that sort of thing: www.youtube.com

Okay, here's a less smarmy link.

Nurse With Wound List # 2: Robert Ashley

SO:
I've been on the road, drinking around New Orleans with all the crusties and fly hunneez and radicals, and missing the sweet embrace of a proper keyboard for the past few months. Fortunately, in that time I not only consumed lousy malt liquor, but also consumed lousy malt liquor while tunneling through the seemingly endless obscuritan cornucopia that is the Nurse With Wound list. When the dick was the last time I blogged about something other than pop-punk? I guess August when I took the world to my loving breast and whispered to them the secrets of Australia's fucking goregrind scene, for some reason. As far as the avant-garde goes, I'd probably have to flip back a few pages...
Regardless, I've found a LOT of amazing, totally out of time, forgotten music through this pursuit, and I'd like to share some of my favorites. There's a shitload of resources for exploring the NWW list out there, but most of them lack a distinctly personal, experiential touch, and seriously, I'd rather read -as well as dole out - a hundred inherently flawed opinions than another dry, genre-dividing shopping list of this stuff.
On that note:

Robert Ashley's been on my mind for a few years now (that handsome devil), and seeing as he just passed on last month at nearly 84, I figured this'd be a good place to restart the blog operation. Ashley was an composer of experimental, vocal-based electronic music and opera, both of which tend toward the harder-edged, more academically buoyed half of the avant-garde spectrum. As such, I can't even feign authority on the subject at hand. I've always putted around the Henry Flynt camp rather than the Stockhausen one, if you catch my drift, but let's give it the ol' "fuck it" try, anyway.
I was first exposed to his compositions through the recommendation of a helpful Soulseek user; he purported that Ashley's archival collection (and specifically the 1964 title track), The Wolfman, contained the earliest pieces of power electronics you could find. Being in a strictly unlovable, armchair "music historian" phase at the time, I masturbated furiously to this idea just like the dipshits who liken Sound Of Imker's "Train Of Doomsday" to the birthpangs of hardcore punk [if you're unfamiliar with this, I think it was based on something Jello Biafra said in an old interview. Ignoring that aspect, it's a pretty rad, unique song]. At this point, I'm pretty sure it's just an ridiculously prescient anomaly (which is backed up by the fact that this never saw a formal release 'til 2002) or maybe just a logical continuum of the Futurist scene or whatever. This is where the whole "not qualified" thing shows up. Either way: holy shit, what an insane piece of music. Rather than describe it in depth, I'm just gonna point you to the video featured below. The track is basically comprised of tape loops, manipulated feedback, and Ashley's roaring drone of vocal intonations, and yeah, had it been distributed back in the day (rather than just performed) I could definitely see it taking the "missing link" throne internet music nerds propose it to hold.

Oh... but considering this is supposed to be a NWW list-related post, let's hit up a few pieces that Stapleton may've actually heard/been inspired by. Part 1:

Released on Italy's Cramps Records - home of Area and all those DIverso improv LPs - Ashley's 1974 album, In Sara, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Men And Women might actually be one of the weirdest depths related to the whole 291 artist list. Consistent of just some squiggly, bubbling synths and Ashley's gentle monotone, In Sara... is a full, 40 minute reading of the 1944 John Barton Wolgamot book of the same name. Apparently, Ashley and a friend became obsessed with said book, staging readings and spending years hunting down the author for clarity and fanboy-ism. It's actually a pretty fascinating story [read it here], and totally worth a look even if you haven't found a shit to give throughout this entire post. The recited text follows the model below over the duration, and swaps out the three groupings of names and the active verb consistently:

“In her very truly great manners of Johannes Brahms very heroically Sara Powell Haardt had very allegorically come amongst his very really grand men and women to Clarence Day, Jr., John Donne, Ruggiero Leoncavalo, James Owen Hannay, Gustav Frenssen, Thomas Beer, Joris Karl Huysmans and Franz Peter Schubert very titanically.”

Apparently Wolgamot found that names were the basis of all rhythm, and as rhythm is the cornerstone of all locomotion, names are uh, apparently the basis of all things. I don't know. He also proposed that when one repeatedly recites Anna Karenina's name aloud, it clearly telegraphs the fact that she would be killed by a train, so that's cool. Pretty embarrassing reveal for Tolstoy, though. Like, come on, man.
Ashley recited these lines with a single breath a' piece, then cut the tape to remove the pauses, creating an uninterrupted, insanely hypnotic, weirdly soothing drone to space out to. It's an oddly beautiful thing, though maybe a bit too claustrophobic to imbibe the devil's marijuana to. I can't embed a link here for some reason, but check out the entire piece here on youtube.
Lastly: I don't know why a drawing of a comic book covered in Marvel characters is the cover of a 40 minute Moog drone album based on a book that features one sentence 128 times, but there ya go.

Okay, one more.
The above clip is taken from Ashley's 1979 LP, Automatic Writing, distributed by Lovely Music Ltd., and it might actually best In Sara... for sheer fucking strangeness. Being a glass half full kinda guy, Ashley decided to take the involuntary murmurs resultant of his mild Tourette's and turn them into a compositional tool for this piece, allowing himself the space to speak at random jaunts in front of a microphone for 48 minutes. The rest is just about as unsettling, with a Moog simmering and creaking eerily above the ghostly slicing of an organ drone, all the while elaborate cut-ups of French whispering permeate and mesh with Ashley's groans. Apparently this also counts as an Opera for some reason, which is fitting, seeing as unforgettable characters such as Tourette's Syndrome, Moog Squiggle, Chopped-Up French Woman Voice, and Really Quiet Organ bequeath a remarkable narrative when they get togethers. This might be another example of my lack of qualifications rising to the surface, but I'm also kind of thinking that Operas generally don't sound like this. And seriously, check wikipedia if you think I'm just being colorful - those 4 things are actually mentioned as "characters". Similarly fitting, the cover looks like some chintzy West Coast jazz compilation you'd donate to the Salvation Army or shrug off when it molds in your basement. Disregarding (or maybe embracing?) all of this, though, this is another incredible, bizarre album that completely makes sense in relation to the Nurse With Wound list.

I haven't really listened to much more than these three pieces, but I'd be willing to bet the rest of his catalog is equally worthwhile, though I can't say I dug Private Parts, much. I was gonna make a joke about the Howard Stern movie, but it seemed so not funny it astounded me.