Every Screaming Ear

Nick Didkovsky's group Doctor Nerve has a knack for changing skin from one album to the next. After the unanimous critical success of Skin in 1996, Cuneiform Records released Every Screaming Ear the next year. At first, the album appears as a mixed bag of goods: live Doctor Nerve tracks including first-days classics and a cover of Captain Beefheart's "When It Blows Its Stacks," a few "Nervewares" (compositions generated by software written by Didkovsky), and experiments with NewEar, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, and the Isso Yukihiro Group. But instead of being a collection of oddities, Every Screaming Ear revealed itself as the ultimate Doctor Nerve experience. Every aspect of the band is represented in its context, so to speak: the ultra-complex, light-speed fast tunes, the almost contemporary chamber works, and the downright craziness that becomes so palpable when seeing the band live. The Nerve experience translates completely to record. All the essential Doctor Nerve is represented on this disc. A must for fans of avant-rock madness.