The second of the Anomalous co-releases is an oddly indefinable, "accidental" remix of Nurse With Wound's first album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella by Matt Waldron of irr.(app.)ext. Chance Meeting is a landmark record of deranged psychedelic proto-industrial experimentation. Matt Waldron's irr.(app.)ext. has produced some of the most exciting audio surrealism to come along in recent years. However, this disc is not the meeting of these two great minds that one might expect. As the story goes, Waldron was making a tape-to-tape dupe of the original United Dairies cassette, when his dysfunctional tape recorder began to warp and mutate the source material, producing its own interpolation of the Nurse classic. This kind of accidentally deteriorating tape idea has recently been used to much more subtle and ingenius effect on William Basinski's Disintegration Loops series. Although I can imagine that the warbles and mutations caused by this tape recorder mishap might have appealed to Matt Waldron and Steven Stapleton, its pleasures are truly ephemeral. All the CD boils down to is an inferior, hiss-heavy transfer of the original album, with some random time-stretching, glitches and wobbles that do very little to increase interest for the listener. Although I admire the love for accident and synchronicity that led Stapleton and Waldron to release this material, I don't think that it will hold much interest for the average listener. This review certainly won't discourage those who obsessively collect everything issued from the Nurse With Wound camp. But for those who are just a little more selective about this stuff, I think I can safely suggest that you steer clear of this unique but ultimately inane piece of conceptual audio.

Jonathan Dean