"Stapleton’s considerable talent stems from his thoroughness as an archivist"

Perhaps unlike any artist before or after him, Steven Stapleton has managed to cleanly weld the ‘psychonaut’ imperatives of global psychedelic music to those of the various 20th century European avant-gardes (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Aktionismus, and so on.) On the one hand, Stapleton’s considerable talent stems from his thoroughness as an archivist: his infamous “Nurse With Wound list” of recommended recordings, included with the early Chance Meeting... LP, has spawned an entire sub-cultural niche market and a voracious clique of speculators for rare recordings. Yet many artists have had a wealth of cultural knowledge that, without being enhanced by additional insights gleaned from personal experience, could not be distilled into compelling works of their own. This is where Stapleton’s music distinguishes itself from that of admirer / emulators like, say, Jim O’Rourke: rather than sounding purely like a record collector’s educational program, Nurse With Wound music is just one exposition of a carefully cultivated private universe that can also be glimpsed in Stapleton’s strikingly original, ectoplasmic visual art. Certainly, some friendships with likeminded spirits have helped too, and many NWW collaborators are remarkable for the cultivation of their own idiosyncratic modes of thought and action (see Current 93, Coil, Hafler Trio, Whitehouse etc.) Of course, it is a characteristic of these benighted times that eccentric gestures and self-mythologizing are seen as “pretentious,” and Stapleton’s apparent fearlessness of such criticisms has given him carte blanche to do whatever he wants musically. In particular, Stapleton reconciles humor and horror in ways that even the original Surrealists did not conceive of. Where else, besides the NWW catalog, can you find looped mambo a la Perez Prado overlaid with piercing electronic feedback? Or regular helpings of industrial violence mixed with cartoon whimsy? Or drone-based works as simply and beautifully executed as Soliloquy for Lilith? These examples of Stapleton’s work only scrape the surface of all that is available on record, but at whatever point you dive in, you are likely to be greeted with some of the most anti-generic music of the post-industrial age.

Thomas Bey William Bailey

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Thomas is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Working with a number of different communications media, TBWB aims to construct a body of work that interrogates notions of utopia, anthropocentrism, and "the extreme," while refusing to reject any unpopular cultural manifestation as invalid until its more nuanced aspects have been brought to light. An admitted autodidact, TBWB draws upon the work of a diverse body of 20th and 21st century thinkers to aid him in a personal quest for 'serious playfulness': Johan Huizinga, John Gray, Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Gregory Bateson, and numerous others all contribute to TBWB's jargon-free, non-specialist writings on creative life. As a sound enthusiast, he takes his cues from composers such as Iannis Xenakis and the new contingent of computer-aided 'glitch' artists: those with no apparent fear of using the full spectrum of audible sound to produce rapturous or ecstatic moments of deep personal inquiry. As of June 2011, TBWB acted as researcher in residence at The Sound Archive Of Experimental Music And Sound Art in Murcia, Spain. His newest book is "Unofficial release: self-released & handmade audio in post-industrial society".