Celebrating 30 years of Nurse With Wound and inspired by Faust's 49p album, The Faust Tapes, categories strain, crack and sometimes break under their burden as Steven Stapleton and company step out of the space provided to create a best of compilation like no other. Featuring loads of familiar music but all in a totally new context this “party mix” is great fun; surprise juxtapositions of material and trying to identify the sources of the various sounds make for a nerdy but highly enjoyable hour of listening.
At only 99p (check your local currency), Paranoia in Hi-Fi is great value for money as long as you can find a shop that stocks it. Intended to encourage Internet shoppers to leave their laptops, venture out into the fresh air down and visit their local independent record store; things have not quite gone to plan with many shops having (or saying they are having) difficulties getting it in. Larger chain stores seem to have had more success stocking it which kind of undermines the sentiments behind this release. Although the appearance of Paranoia in Hi-Fi on auction sites for inflated prices is particularly distasteful; give some people an inch and they take a mile.
Paranoia in Hi-Fi is a good studio approximation of the Nurse With Wound live experience but here the focus is more on the fun side of the music than the intense experiences of the concert hall. Those familiar with Matt Waldron’s Possible Nurse Mix for Sun and Moon Ensemble should know what to expect; instantly recognizable bits of Nurse sounds re-arranged and massaged into a new piece by Stapleton and Andrew Liles. Stapleton’s entire back catalogue has been trawled to make Paranoia in Hi-Fi, taking in the obvious “greatest hits” like “Rock’n Roll Station,” “Two Mock Projections,” and “Salt Marie Celeste.” “Two Shaves and a Shine” makes an appearance but it is the awful disco remix from the 2006 reissue of An Awkward Pause. Yet as bad as that remix seemed plonked in between the other fantastic bonus tracks on that album, on Paranoia in Hi-Fi it works far better. I still do not particularly like it but it at least brought a smile to my face this time.
There is some new material peppered throughout the album but it is unclear whether these are going to be unique to Paranoia in Hi-Fi or are works in progress for forthcoming releases. Each new bit is tantalising in that they seem to be completely at odds with a lot of the recent NWW releases. There is some reference to the lounge feel of Huffin’ Rag Blues but there is also some great guitar bits including one that mutates the main riff from Black Sabbath’s eponymous song and transplants it into the body of a Max Ernst painting. Later what sounds like a strange marimba and bell combo play a disjointed rhythm as strange toy animals sounds groan in the foreground. If these are sneak previews for next year’s releases then it sounds like another good year for NWW fans.
As fun as Paranoia in Hi-Fi is, you get what you pay for. If this was a normally priced CD I would definitely be coming away more than a little disappointed (although not as disappointed as I was with the similarly minded but badly executed Great in the Small by Current 93). However, for 99p I am getting a lot more bang for my buck and the sentiments behind this release are genuine; Nurse With Wound was borne out of record stores as like-minded friends scoured the racks for oddities so it is nice to see them try and get people back into the shops to discover new things by chance instead of the dreary quotidian experience of online ordering (or worse, downloading). Stapleton and Liles’ plan worked for me as it took me three cities to track my copy down (despite the local store ordering it ages ago for me, still waiting on the order to come in) but I found a lot of cool little releases that I would have missed had I not been on the hunt.
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