Automating Vol. 3 CD ICR DISTRIBUTION

Third volume in the series of compiling remixes,tracks that only appeared on compilations & other miscellany,stretching back 25 years. Some really great stuff on here! REVIEW FROM BRAINWASHED : After many years, the third instalment in Nurse With Wound’s classic Automating series of compilations has been unveiled. Digging up old nuggets from the last 26 years, this is another trip through the dustier, forgotten regions of Steven Stapleton’s back catalogue. Not quite as dazzling as the previous entries in the Automating series, this compilation still shows the strength of Nurse With Wound’s expansive approach to sound and most importantly, saves me a lot of leg work in tracking down old compilations. United Dairies The first two Automating compilations stick out as not only being great examples of compilations working as standalone albums but as two of the best releases put out under the Nurse With Wound name. Automating Volume Two was one of my first NWW purchases and it has remained one of my favourites consistently. As such, Automating Volume Three has a lot to live up to and although not as consistent as the earlier volumes, it performs admirably. “Antacid Cocamotive 93” mutates the ’60s pop song “The Loco-Motion” into something stranger; the piece comes from the same sessions as The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion and, like the rest of that album, is highly reminiscent of The Residents’ Third Reich’n Roll album. Elsewhere, “Beetle Crawls Across My Back” sees Nurse With Wound in rare melodic form; its eastern sounding strings subtly warped by Stapleton as what sounds like a didgeridoo joins in the jam. The song degenerates into a primal beat as Diana Rogerson delivers some truly unsettling vocals. It anchors the rest of the album around it, a definite centrepiece which is as good as any canonical Nurse With Wound piece and would have been perfectly at home on Rock’n Roll Station (recorded around the same time as “Beetle Crawls Across My Back”). “Ubu Noir” is another version of Stapleton’s rendition of the traditional song “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” which is quite a departure from the extant versions on She and Me Fall Together in Free Death and Rat Tapes Volume One. Here it sounds like a broken Kraftwerk crawling out of the darkness of a nuclear apocalypse. REVIEW FROM AQUARIUS : In 1986, Steven Stapleton released Automating Vol. 1, filled with some choice selections he had produced for various compilations during his previous eight years of existence as Nurse With Wound. Given just how much amazing material Stapleton produced in the prolific NWW catalog, it’s not surprising that his tracks for compilations were pretty damn good even as some of these pieces were drastic remixes and edits of material already on other albums, or they were tracks that didn’t quite ‘fit’ onto one of his already eccentric takes of industrial-psychedelic-concrete constructions by way of classic Surrealism. So, jump to 2010, and Stapleton has now released Automating Vol. 3 (yes, there was a Volume 2), with equally astounding results again demonstrating his studio magic. The compilation moves mostly in chronological order, starting with a track from 1984 and traversing almost to the present with a 2008 piece. The earliest number came from a Japanese compilation called Sound Cosmodel, spliced from metallic slashes and the spoken word of a breathy French woman, providing a typically unsettled Nurse collage. The comedy side of NWW comes by way of “Antacid Cocamotive 93” with a funhouse cover of the early ’60s hit “Do The Locomotion” that nearly spins off the rails with Diana Rogerson offering her zombified vocals to accompany the warbling silliness of the tune. Another Rogerson duet appears by way of the track “Beetle Crawls Across My Back” recontextualizing the material that she and Stapleton used on one of the Chrystal Belle Scrodd records. Very creepy, dark atmospheres, with almost ritualist percussion buried way down deep upon which Rogerson snarls her nightmarish tale, you guessed it, about insects crawling on her back.”Ubu Noir” is a 2006 redux of “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair” – the Appalachian standard that grew notorious via Patty Waters’ version in the 60s. Here, Stapleton’s cybernetic vocals rasp above blackened loops and leviathan plods. But perhaps the most atypical track is the remix that Stapleton did for the death metal band Cadaverous Condition. Given the uncanny success Stapleton had with the SUNNO))) remix a few years back, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as he stretches out the thunderous rhythms, adds haunted chorale loops, and smears the chugging riffs into chunks of mutant noise. Yeah, it’s a diverse mix of material; but what Nurse With Wound album isn’t? And yeah, it’s definitely recommended!