The first release on United Dairies, recorded in six hours by an unrehearsed trio, dedicated to Russolo and carrying the NWW List. The opening document of the post-industrial avant-garde, if not its best record.
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella is the debut album by Nurse With Wound, released on the band's own United Dairies label in the summer of 1979 as UD01. The Bureau files it at Tier I not as the project's finest record · it is plainly not · but as a document: the record that opens United Dairies, prints the NWW List, and states at the outset the cross-genre method Nurse With Wound would spend the next four decades developing.
The story of its making is part of the record. Steven Stapleton, working as a signwriter, fell into conversation with a studio engineer, Nicky Rogers, who wanted to record something more experimental than the advertising work the room brought in. Stapleton claimed to be in such a band; he was not, and had to assemble one quickly, calling his friends John Fothergill and Heman Pathak and telling them to find an instrument of some kind. The three entered the studio with no rehearsal, gathered cheap guitars, a ring modulator, an organ, effects and found objects, and recorded the album in roughly six hours, working almost entirely from improvisation. Stapleton and Fothergill, interviewed separately years later, told the same story, which is the Bureau's reason for treating it as true rather than legend.
What the method produces is three long tracks edited from those improvisations with some overdubbing. The opener, Two Mock Projections, is the most approachable: Rogers's "commercial guitar", added as part of the deal, and some unusually melodic organ from Pathak give it a foothold. From there the record moves into stranger territory, the playing loose and exploratory, the structure assembled afterwards at the editing stage rather than performed. The Bureau notes the obvious: this is the sound of three people with little conventional skill finding their way through a roomful of instruments, and its interest lies in exactly that, not in mastery.
The framing is where the record states its position. It is dedicated to Luigi Russolo, the futurist who built noise instruments in 1913, which places Nurse With Wound in a line that predates rock entirely. The title is lifted from Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror · the surrealist image of a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting by chance on a dissecting table · and that image of incongruous things forced together is also a fair account of the music. The sleeve, designed by Stapleton from an old pornographic magazine, completes the gesture. The record announces an avant-garde inheritance and wears it openly.
Then there is the NWW List. Printed with the album, it ran to roughly 291 obscure influence-artists compiled by the original trio · a map of European progressive, electronic and underground music that most readers had never heard. The list outlived the record's reputation: it became a collector's index, a checklist, a document of the underground in its own right, and arguably the most influential single thing about the release. The Bureau files it as part of the record because it cannot be separated from it.
Where it sits: the opening document of the post-industrial avant-garde; primary in F·01 Musique concrète through its edited-improvisation method; continuous with the cut-up tradition through assembly rather than performance; rooted in surrealism, dada and Russolo's futurism through its open avant-garde framing; and the first link in the United Dairies catalogue. It is not where a listener should start with Nurse With Wound, and the Bureau says so plainly; but it is where the project, the label and the List all begin.