Music

Rupture
A collaboration between Nurse With Wound (Steven Stapleton) and Graham Bowers

This work is an attempt to create a musical illustration of the ‘goings-on’ in the brain during the last hour and three minutes of a life after suffering a major stroke.

The piece is multi-layered and is primarily concerned with the internal chaos caused by the loss of control of thought processes, responses and consequential actions, with all types of incoherent disjointed memories and present real time events – as well as moments of lucidity, panic and fear – clashing, merging and evolving.

When the complexity of the human brain’s retained information and the inherent properties which constitute a‘life’, an ‘individual’, a ‘person’, are catastrophically damaged after blood – ‘life’s fuel’ – ruptures the previously organised and essential control centres, absolute mayhem follows.
The cold, hard indisputable truth, and one that we all have no alternative but to accept, is that:
“… a life as it now is, is not what it was, and never will be again”.

CD ~ " ... is not what it was,"   Vinyl ~ Disk Two

Brainwashed Magazine

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This "musical illustration" of the events occurring in the brain following a lethal stroke is a dramatic, chilling and emotional portrait. Musically, it is removed from anything else Nurse With Wound have done (even if it does touch on similar influences as the rest of Steve Stapleton’s body of work) as Bowers adds a more composerly hand to Stapleton’s surrealist drift. Bowers and Stapleton have crafted something unique that does not fit neatly into any categories, even amongst Nurse With Wound’s expanded horizons. This is draining, devastating and utterly compelling.

Bowers’ work in the medical field designing environmentally controlled rooms for operating theatres and medical imaging suites has added tremendously to the power of the piece. Listening to this from two different perspectives, firstly from that of an enthusiastic experimental music listener and secondly from my professional perspective as a neuroscientist reveals an impressive and moving synthesis of art, science and pathos. Concepts such as memory and disinhibition of neural networks are played out in the music; a warped sample of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the sound of children’s voices appear to represent the resurgence of memories in the minutes before death (possibly due to metabolic disturbances within the temporal lobes of the brain). The disrupted electrophysiological rhythms of the brain are represented in the discordant and tumultuous rhythms of Bowers’ playing.

Towards the end of the album, various permutations of "My Blue Heaven" are played, gasped and hinted at. The protagonist/patient/spirit promises to see loved ones (whether living or dead, we are unsure) in their blue heaven. The effect is moving and unsettling, my own memories at the loss of loved ones (albeit not from a stroke) emerging in the fabric of the music. While I have always found Nurse With Wound’s music to be enthralling on a number of levels, this is the first time I have ever felt Stapleton’s music to connect in such a powerfully emotional way. I have been frightened, entertained, humoured and provoked but never have I felt grief.

The weight of Rupture is crushing; this is not music to turn on, sit back and relax to. It is intrusive, captivating and mentally exhausting. Each time I listen to the album, I feel like another little part of me has changed. Aptly, the titles of the segments sum up not only the medical and physiological implications of a stroke but my feelings as a listener following this work: "A life as it now is, is not what it was, and will never be again."

Freq ~ Magazine

Linus Tossio ~ 1st January 2012

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Sweeping in on modernist orchestrations, Rupture is a very different kind of Nurse With Wound collaboration, though there is plenty which harks back to Steve Stapleton‘s tape-loop manipulations of orchestral music both in Nursey guise and with Current 93‘s earlier harshly overbearing recordings in the pre-Apocalyptic Folk days. Here there is an explicit theme hinted at in the title, as the ensemble attempt to envisage musically what it might feel like to undergo a severe brain embolism – and who better for sculptor and composer Graham Bowers to work with on such a project than Messrs. Stapleton, Liles, Waldron and Potter?

Wall of sound doesn’t begin to adequately describe the onslaught they unleash together; once the first few gentle tones of part one’s calm before the rupture (“… a life as it now is,”) have been dispensed with, there’s no stopping the sounds layering and slathering over each other in an incrementing palimpsest of composed, found, cut, pasted and thoroughly mashed up sources, from bombastic kettledrums and braying horn sections to the crooning sounds of yore, flummoxed and banjaxed together. Part two (“…is not what it was,”) is marked by the sudden drop from rubbery throbs and a slowing of the heartbeat pulse as what sounds like a terribly unprepared piano is given a strum, plonk and surging snippy surgery as the cackling, pounding blood music flows lopsidedly, seemingly up, down and round the hill with an increasingly demented air as a marching band engorges itself Ourobouros-style inside the victim’s head.

The religiose cacophony of the likes of C93′s Dog’s Blood Rising and Bowers’ own compositional method (which he terms sound theatre) bubbles up through the mire on synthetic strings and sampled roadworks, a symphony of multimedia detritus emergent as the brain begins to recurse upon itself, then shatter under the strain of catastrophic failure. The stumbling, slurred incoherence of a stroke sufferer comes via the poor abused piano once again and shivery strands of synthesis, smeared and traumatised by tape manipulations in the throes of Modernist spasms and bilious chorales.

There are repeated visitations to rhythmic devices – clocks, pulsing arteries, bright shards of painful sound stabbing straight for the inner ear, bowel-churning rumbles of the corpus under stress and strain – whose recurrence builds into a narrative of dissolution, of inevitable consequences of the blockage of blood flow to the brain. Part three (“…and will never be again”) brings medical emergency sounds in as the patient stabilises, the whirr and heave of assisted breathing phasing in and out of audibility with the immanence of those pearly gates and white-lit voids chiming at the brink. The thrum, crunch and crashes of the orchestral heaves take up the strain, the musical body undergoing its own catharsis as the voices return. Indistinct and unquiet, their speech is hesitant, their laughter hollow and the moans chorused to a fragmentary swing coda, jazz mired in a soup of dissonant brazen memories as the words decay to nullity.

A dizzying descent into malfunction on the most personal of levels, Rupture marks a return to gelatinous surrealistic pillow music from NWW in one of those fortuitous collaborations which was just waiting for the right circumstances to happen.

a closer listen ~ Magazine

Richard Allen ~ 26th January 2012

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One hour, three minutes and thirty seconds of death: that’s one way to describe Rupture, and in this case, the description is literal. This concept album seeks to “create a musical illustration” of the dying brain following a stroke; and damn, is it powerful.  The brain is a miraculous storage facility, but following a stroke, all of the neurons get jumbled.  The ensuing hodgepodge of memory and fantasy, important and inconsequential is fearsome and wondrous all at once.  So much packed into electrical impulses!  So much beauty, so much despair!  All of these conflicting thoughts and feelings are present in Rupture, an album composed in a tightly controlled fashion, yet ironically reflective of chaos.

Shy strings and sullen brass introduce the stroke: bursts of color like tiny stars exploding in the brain.  A series of drum rolls leads to an ominous passageway.  From whence do these incoherent voices stem?  Are their chants sinister or benign?  (To quote Jacob’s Ladder, “if you’re frightened of dying, and you’re holding on, you’ll see demons tearing your life away”.)  Is there a message embedded in their code?  And what of the radio transmission that follows?  Is it a memory, a phantasm, a TV show?  Who will sort these things out?  Why do sense not?  Who in, as wonder?  Feel.  Truth, is!  Is!
Why does the phone keep ringing?  Who am I?  At this point, the questions are moot.  As outsiders, we know what’s happening.  We know that the heartbeat is fading, that the systems are dying, that the snatches of radio, the choirs and laughter, the children singing “Happy birthday”, are all part of a larger scheme: a life.  The auditory dredge is in full effect, but scrambled.  Notes begin to warp as if passing through wormholes.  And yet, for brief moments, everything makes sense.  The mind is back in the presence of the indelible: a playground, an orchestra, a Latin mass.  Yet as the blood vessels grow desperate for oxygen, all coherence fades.  The sensical crumbles into the void.  A clock stops and restarts.  One yearns to comfort one who by nature cannot be comforted, can no longer recognize comfort, can only recognize that there is no more recognition – and soon even that will be lost.