** The full album plus additional unpublished tracks: ‘A Pig In A Poke’ and ‘A resounding Tinkle‘ and an alternative mix of the title track. In a full colour CD 6 panel digipak of heavy gauge card in gloss laminate. ** Healsgebedda Budgerigar (mangled old English for “beloved budgie”) is the latest long‑form hallucination from Nurse With Wound, the ever‑mutating project of Steven Stapleton. Initially conceived as an exclusive for subscribers to The Quietus, this mind‑bending trip now arrives on vinyl via The State51 Conspiracy as a deluxe gatefold LP, gathering three extended pieces into a single, disorienting narrative about how sound and memory contaminate one another over time. Critics have already called it “a sonic document of profound but fleeting psychedelic anamnesis,” and it plays exactly like that: not a concept album in the tidy sense, but a cracked séance for things you’re no longer sure you lived through.
The opening side, Healsgebedda Budgerigar / Naaaagh Ha, drops you straight into the scramble of recollection. Voices of a once‑dear pet, scraps of jazz apparently leaking from an old Bakelite radio, the doppler smear of a passing police car, the anxious buzz of a wasp, someone impatiently retuning for opera - all of it flickers past like half‑erased magnetic tape. Stapleton doesn’t present these as clean samples; they warp, smear, repeat at the wrong speed, or arrive already frayed, as if they’ve been dubbed over too many times. Gradually the collage sinks into bardo‑like depths: pulses thin out, tonal centres dissolve, and you find yourself in a weightless zone where memory has detached from chronology and become pure texture.
If the first piece is about the vertigo of trying to piece the past together, He Went In A Pig And Came Out A Sausage focuses on a single, nagging image: the theme to a favourite childhood cowboy show that may, or may not, have existed. Over its duration, that phantom jingle keeps threatening to materialise - in a snatch of brass, a loping rhythm, a whistled contour - only to be swallowed again by noise, drone and stray environmental clutter. The journey is from sublime reverie to something faintly ridiculous, and back: the title’s blunt humour undercuts the nostalgia, reminding you how easily epic memories are grafted onto junk culture, cheap TV and misheard slogans. NWW’s trademark post‑industrial, sampledelic netherworld becomes a laboratory for examining how kitsch and revelation often share the same audible space.
Across the album’s roughly forty minutes, Stapleton expands a single “mind‑bending trip” into a full, guess‑again ecosystem. Familiar Nurse With Wound signatures are everywhere - cut‑up radiophony, queasy loops, organic crud rubbing up against synthetic smear - but Healsgebedda Budgerigar feels unusually focused on the slippage between biography and hallucination. The pieces don’t escalate toward catharsis; they rotate, refract and double back, as if you’re walking through the same corridor of recollections at slightly different angles each time. Moments of almost conventional beauty (a drifting chord, a clear horn phrase) appear like islands, then sink again beneath layers of hiss, junk percussion and broken signal.
