The Nurse With Wound List

“In 1979, industrial music collective Nurse With Wound released their first record, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Paired with its BDSM-themed album cover, you'll understand from this Maldoror-quoting title that proximity to the pop charts was not especially high on the list of priorities for the original three performers in Nurse With Wound (Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, Heman Pathak). They were, however, record-collecting obsessives sharing an impressive knowledge of the avant-garde within their artform. The trio prepared a printed insert to include inside copies of Chance Meeting that listed 291 experimental, boundary-pushing, forward-thinking and just-plain-out-there musical artists they had been inspired by or interested in (they then surpassed 300 entries with a revised edition for their next album). The NWW List was in its time (and today still is) a valuable underground index for adventurously-minded record collectors. It likely did more than most other media resources of the pre-Internet world to foreground musicians of underrepresented genres in a way that continues to inform their curation now. Even by modern standards, you'll be hard pressed to find a media outlet, blog, channel, etc. that is as deep in the know as these three folks were in 1979.”