2LP version. This is the long-anticipated vinyl edition of the collaboration between Steven Stapleton (Nurse with Wound) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), exploring the darkest regions of the airwaves and live electronics. It’s an ominous trip into radio waves, processed voices, electronics, squeaky guitars and a mysterious labyrinth of echoing sonic disturbances.

The starting point was an hour-long live recording that Stapleton handed over to Rimbaud, taken from the Nurse with Wound show in Adelaide in 2014 (the same concert where a handmade CD-R with the title Contrary Motion was sold, though the two releases share nothing else). Rimbaud built the structure of the album in about a week, cutting the recording into sections and mixing into it voices, radio frequencies and found sounds from his own archive. In his words, “almost everything was recorded live to the Nurse with Wound material, rarely quantised and tidied up, as I always like to maintain the sensibility of playing live, even if we were not in the same room this time.” Premixing is by Andrew Liles.

Each piece has its own machinery. Conium Maculatum rides a hypnotic rhythm played on modular synth, “a form of psychedelic motorik pulse to pull the listener in”. The regular beeping of Cocculus, almost like a telephone ringtone, comes from an Ellitone Farm Detective Ultrarollz, which suggested to Rimbaud “a lighthouse as if seen from the deck of a boat, far out to sea”. Cicuta Virosa is built on an alien organ sound that opens and closes almost at random, Tartaricum uses the sound of stones rolling on the ground slowed to a glacial pace, and the closing Mezereum “essentially devours the original Nurse with Wound recordings, splintering them, and offering up this deeply spacious closure.” The six titles are names of homeopathic remedies. Stapleton wanted each track to fade away and return a few seconds later, so that the album stays “a singular story, divided into parts”: getting the fades right took nine or ten different mixes, exchanged on CD-R, since Stapleton does not use email. Writing for Igloo Magazine, Justin Patrick Moore heard in it something “as if Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen had to use EKGs, sterilizers, ventilators, diffusion pumps and defibrillators instead of oscillators and bandpass filters.”

This vinyl edition is a double LP, with 3 sides of music and one side with a special Babs Santini etching (Santini is the name Stapleton signs his paintings with, and the cover art is his too).