‘The Hovels Of The Rich Or The Rigid Digit’ marks the tenth collaboration between Nurse With Wound and French publisher Lenka Lente, their history found across a succession of 3”CDs paired with short books authored by historic European writers including Frank Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Adolf Wölfli, and for this volume French writer, journalist and pessimist Alphonse Rabbe. The discs have afforded Steven Stapleton’s modern guise opportunities to work on a short-form piece (usually around 10 minutes playing time) within an ostensibly abstracted format, and the previous discs have sat in a comfortable, and I wonder if somewhat overlooked, fringe to Nurse With Wound’s ever-expanding discography.
For this release the book is again in French and with no translation, so any ties between music and text are for me at least imagined. Just perhaps Rabbe’s withdrawal from society is mirrored in the choice of intangible murmurs which are fed into Nurse With Wound’s piece, but I doubt it: that kind of attribution would give every experimental artist an immediately vague lofty literary link, and I put Nurse With Wound a step beyond that. The connection between Rabbe’s drug addiction and Nurse With Wound’s recent ‘Opium Cabaret’ CD and LP is probably coincidental, but ‘The Hovels Of The Rich Or The Rigid Digit’ does fall broadly into the ambient bracket of Steven Stapleton and Co’s work – although without the drama which makes ‘Opium Cabaret’ one of the standouts of modern Nurse With Wound.
Rather, this 3”CD is a more serene and stagnant work, emphasising a higher frequency register to remain in the air at all times with a simplicity and glissando of movement more in line with a truncated ‘Soliloquy For Lilith’. The opening delicate shimmer quickly opens up a broader and loosely cycled clutch of tones, concocted tones seeming to merge with slowed and shaped acoustic material in the way of bowed cymbals or resonant piano strings, the interplay of effected and organic constantly difficult to separate and made even more difficult when a subtle layer of further manipulation emerges from the digital concrète rattling which lurks in the shadows of the piece. Those soft tonal interplays continue as the piece dilates slowly and incrementally, the upper register tones kept prominent to obscure a diaphragmatic lower register drone which adds a barely perceptible weight to the piece. Even the piece’s climax doesn’t break the slow drift of the piece, an arc of more urgent staccato clattering and even a rare glimmer of feedback with the electronic tones failing to ignite the gaseous elements of the piece.
Unlike ‘Opium Cabaret’ the detail to ‘The Hovels Of The Rich Or The Rigid Digit’ is much harder to extract, and it’s easier to appreciate the piece in its drift rather than in the finer elements which are there to support the larger structure. It wouldn’t necessarily make for a strong full-length work, but Nurse With Wound’s latest Lenka Lente creation works well as a short escape into the atmosphere with which to return and pick up something else. There’s no doubt Steven Stapleton is skilled in immersive ambience, and ‘The Hovels Of The Rich Or The Rigid Digit’ is proof even if some of Stapleton’s stronger skills are responsible for subtler elements which sit around a perhaps simpler central drone creation.
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