A Chance Meeting

FINIPRESANCESANSISSUE

I still haven’t recovered from an intense weekend of music. I went to Brainwaves, Brainwashed.com’s 10th anniversary festival, and it did not disappoint. Highlights of the weekend were wry Czech trickster Aranos, a Nurse with Wound collaborator who brought charm and sly humor to his violin-driven songs; the lilting, wistful electronica of Charles Atlas (aided for the performance by former Cursive violinist Gretta Cohn); a DJ set by Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound); a series of films by Peter Chistopherson (Coil); and exuberant, puckish sets from the incredibly Residential Irr(App)(Ext.) and wayward prog-psych of Volcano the Bear —the latter, as my friend put it, “like This Heat meets the Kids In the Hall.” That just about sums it up, really.

Steve Stapleton’s incredibly enjoyable DJ set sent me scrambling all over the vast reaches of the internet looking for the tracks he played. If anyone has a tracklist, please share. (You’d have to be the trainspotter to end all trainspotters to get all those songs —I’m clearly still on the kiddie slope when it comes to recognizing incredibly obscure music).

Of course, THAT sent me to the infamous Nurse with Wound List (you know the one —it came tipped in with the first Nurse With Wound album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella). The unadorned, un-annotated list of 300+ names has subsequently become much sought-after by anyone even vaguely interested in proto-psych, Krautrock, free jazz, improv and outsider music.

Culled from the NWW List we have the delightful discovery of an early Sally Timms track (credited to “Sally Smmit and Her Musicians), the A-side of an imaginary soundtrack known as “Hangahar.” Nowadays we all know Sally as the brassy singer of the Mekons but at the age of 19 she recorded this impressively operatic EP for Pete Shelley’s short-lived Groovy label (which also released his incredibly rare “Sky Yen” album). She was aided and abetted by Shelley and Lindsay Lee, Tony Wilson’s first wife. (For more obscure delights from the list, look no further than WFMU’s Beware of the Blog )

I’d give anything for Side B of this, especially since the 12” is currently going for $218.00 on GEMM! *Sigh*

Brainwashed | The Mekons | Sally Timms

MP3Sally Smmit and Her Musicians, ”Hangahar (Side A)”

ARTWORK BY LEONOR FINI

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2 Comments

  1. sounds like an excellent day…. did you get to hear any of Christopherson’s new Threshold HouseBoy Choir stuff? – there are a few NWW list full album blogs out there; if I could remember their addresses I’d post them… is one called insect and individual? – it’s dead now, i think but whack the address into technorati etc and i think the rest’ll come up…

    • Yes, there was musical accompaniment by the Choir to the film. It was incredibly eerie and beautiful.

      The Wiki on the NWW list has a number of online resources, as does that WFMU link. That WFMU link is a treasure trove, it really is! So nice of them to keep all those tracks up there for us to enjoy…

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