Acts of Senseless Beauty

Nurse with Wound

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Acts of Senseless Beauty Review

by Rolf Semprebon

This pairing of Nurse With Wound's usual, or rather unusual, sonic collages with the more organic sounds of Aranos' violin gels quite nicely, with neither artist subsuming the other. If anything, like on the best collaborations, they push each other beyond their normal boundaries, and certainly this album is far more playful than previous collaborations involving NWW/Steve Stapleton. Many of the tracks start out in ambient territory, slow tentative explorations of improvisational scrapes and hums. Many of these either build up slowly, or erupt quite suddenly into throbbing avant-rock structures, at which point the violin dances and weaves wildly among the clattering rhythms and other sounds, eventually to slide back into a droning murky dissonance or dreamy flows. Added to this mix are a few sections of heavily processed vocals chanting bizarrely. From the beginning of "Either Open or Unsound" unfurling like the soundtrack to a haunting movie, to the hidden track at the end with dub-rhythms and more crazed vocals, Acts of Senseless Beauty offers a bizarre hallucinatory journey into another musical dimension.

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