v/a- STRAIN CRACK & BREAK: Music From The Nurse With Wound List Volume Two 2LP

Highly recommended.

With his ongoing commitment to like-minded archivist label Finders Keepers Records, industrial music pioneer Steven Stapleton further entrusts them to lift the veil and expose “the right tracks” from his uber-legendary and oft misinterpreted psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List.

Feat. 12 lesser-known German records that played a hugely important part in the initial foundations of the list which began to unfold when Stapleton was just 13-years-old.

At the start of a journey that commenced before phrases like kosmische and the xeno-ignant Krautrock tag had become mag hack currency, this compendium is devoid of the tropes that united what many would accurately argue to be the greatest progressive pop bands in Europe (namely CAN, Neu! and Kraftwerk) and rather shatters the ingredients across a ground zero landscape for both inquisitive fans and socially rehabbing musos to begin to assemble a unique self-styled identity.

If Krautrock was the music that journalist told us lurked behind schlager (German pop) in the 1970s, then this record includes the music that skulked behind Krautrock and perhaps refused to polish its backhanded name belt.

Including lesser-known artists like the late Wolfgang Dauner whose career proceeded and outlived the kosmische movement while consistently informing and outsmarting ‘em whenever they got stuck in their metronomic ruts, or how about Fritz Müller, the man who was to Kraftwerk what Stuart Sutcliffe was to The Beatles but had more in common with Yoko and quite rightly couldn’t give a shit about the Fab Four’s Hamburg roots.

Elsewhere we have a plethora of German bands made for German audiences as they try and shed second hand flower power Americanisms and feel the benefits of much harder drugs and the realisations of difficult second album budgets while Kommune 1 newsflashes wipe smiles from everybody’s faces and replace them with opioid chic or acid-sarcastic grins.