If you were to draw up a shortlist of artists to remix your album with a view to rendering the material completely unrecognizable, Nurse With Wound would probably feature somewhere near the top. Of course, for Sunn O))) to pick NWW to give their second album release, 2000’s ‘ØØ Void’ a heavy-duty overhaul makes perfect sense: there’s no point in giving their fifteen-minute drone epics a conventional remix treatment, because it simply wouldn’t work. Even if it wasn’t so obvious as to be painful, and therefore unsuited to the completely anti-everything doom-grind the cowelled crusaders crank out at a million decibels, the idea of sticking a range of dance beats under their crushing zero BPM wall of guitar sustain is simply ludicrous, and plain naff. Imagine the endless cranked-up speaker-shredding feedback with a trip-hop beat under it, then repeated with a disco beat and some synths thrown in, and yet again with a trance vibe. Yeah, it’s about as feasible as a dub mix: pointless and rubbish.
When asked in 2007 to remix the tracks to provide a second disc for the Japanese release of the band’s second album from 2000 , NWW went to town, and only by really fucking with the material have they done it due justice. It must have been quite a challenge. I mean, where do you go with that kind of course material?
Why, you slow it down, of course! ‘Dysnytaxis (...a Chance Meeting with Somnus)’ fades in slowly, an eery hum of a drone like a top spinning in slow-motion. The grit of the overdriven to hell guitars is smoothed to slowly oscillating waves, an ominous sound that radiates and builds before layers are added, meandering strings, anaesthetised to the point at which movement is barely discernible... It continues for a full nineteen minutes, by which time the tension is almost unbearable and is crawled into your skull, creeping around the cranial cavity and slowly – always slowly – building pressure behind the eyes and in the ear drums. It’s far too unsettling to be calming, let alone sleep-inducing: if anything, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
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It sets the tone for the remaining tracks. The sparsely majestic ‘Ash On the Trees (the Sudden Ebb of a Diatribe) features vocals, buried on the original mix, which have been exhumed and allowed to float free, disembodied and strange. Meanwhile the two parts of ‘Ra at Dawn’ - subtitled ‘Rapture, at Last’ and ‘Numbed by her Light’ are deep, dark and difficult. The first of these is hauntingly atmospheric at first, and develops into a churning miasma of dark rumbles, while the second begins climactically and eventually tapers off and fades into the deep, while resonating for an eternity.
Sunn O)) Online
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