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Paul Allen, late of Bristol psych unit The Heads, loosed his second album as Anthroprophh upon the world in September. Outside the Circle hangs song titles such as “2013 and She Told Me I Was Die” over a sonic countryside populated by the droopy third eye of stoner metal, the blinding astronomical event of Boredoms, and the dark absurdist kibitzing of The Mothers of Invention. Naturally, a few crania got bent. The Quietus wrote it “feels like the album that the equally eccentric and esoteric Akron/Family would become like the Manson Family and kill to make.”
Anthroprophh’s label, Rocket Recordings, has a bio up for the group on Bandcamp; the most striking thing is how it weaves promotional copy through entries from the Nurse With Wound list. The list, named after Steven Stapleton’s seminal musical outlet, dates back to 1979, when Nurse With Wound included an inventory of recording artists influential to them among copies of that band’s first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. In the ensuing decades, the list has taken on a life of its own, becoming a crucial document for collectors and the basis for much discussion, including whether some of the artists mentioned even exist.
Tiny Mix Tapes talked to Allen about his relationship with the Nurse With Wound list, music discovery, and the idea of an experimental-music canon.
Was the Nurse With Wound list fundamental for the band as collectors? What is your personal history with it?
I wouldn’t say it was fundamental to the band as a whole but for myself, it certainly provides a good reference for the kind of artists that were of great interest from a particular and prolific period within modern music. To me, the list is not an anachronism and has had some relevance for anyone curious about experimental music since its publication in 1979. I came to be aware of it via my burgeoning interest in krautrock. The Ultima Thule record shop website decided to print the list in its entirety. I never could afford or even obtain the first Nurse with Wound LP, especially at that time back in the late 90s, so I never saw it in the flesh, so to speak. I didn’t religiously hunt down a lot of the records on the list, and some of the music I just naturally bumped into in my search for artists I had never heard of before...
Read the rest of this great interview here: Tiny Mix Tapes
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