The Sleeping Moustache

Let's begin with the introductions.
M.S. Waldron may be best known for his work as irr. app. (ext.), an unwieldy moniker that begets uncanny, hallucinatory sound. Steven Stapleton is the genius behind Nurse With Wound, the consistently unpredictable project that scrambles musical obsessions for krautrock, surrealism, and avant-garde composition into a brash quest for expressionism through experimentation. Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson hails from the Icelandic electro-absurdist duo Stilluppsteypa, which continues to investigate the finer points of drunken minimalism. Jim Haynes prefers to merely state that he rusts things. R.K. Faulhaber is something of a mysterious figure, looming around Mr. Waldron's irr. app. (ext.) recordings and performances while keeping his own work a hermetic secret.
Each with a peculiar understanding of the audio arts, these five artists came to the proverbial table and thought it a good idea to collaborate. Given the predilection for the surreal and the sidereal that each of these five employ in their many audio and visual projects, those agendas oozed from the recordings that became known as The Sleeping Moustache.
An epiphany of controlled disorder, a convulsion of beauty, a cascade of thought from delirious minds, The Sleeping Moustache is an exquisite manifestation of sound poetry scattered into a tortuous collage mired in an oblique melancholy. Magnetic tones extracted from the ether, mechanical sounds smeared into a lugubrious growls, horns trumpeting straight out of John's Book of Revelation, ululations sliced into information overload that Schwitters himself would be proud of. The Sleeping Moustache presents a psychically instable landscape, where dreams and nightmares wreak havoc upon the drudgery of daily life. The closest audible territory for The Sleeping Moustache might be the psychoactive constructions of Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, although the characters in this drama happened upon an entirely different map of that terrain. ©

The Sleeping Moustache is a collaborative venture from the above music and mischief makers. I'd hazard a guess that Matt Waldron is the lynchpin in this release. He's performed with Steven Stapleton as part of Scribble Seven and as part of the Nurse With Wound line-up for their recent performances in the USA - which to all accounts were quite disappointing. Stapleton, meanwhile, has featured in Waldron's live performances as irr. app. (ext)., as has Jim Haynes and R.K. Faulhaber - the mysterious entity with a myspace page. Waldron has also remixed work for Sigmarsson, and collaborated with the Icelandic electro-absurdists Stilluppsteypa. Having said that The Sleeping Moustache appears to stem from the stronger and stranger works of Nurse With Wound. There's no information on who does what or with what. It wouldn't matter as the material is so heavily processed it's hard to tell what instruments are being used, never mind decipher the source sounds. A series of dronescapes that spiral, pulsate and glisten are unfurled that are met with randon bursts of metallic clinks, clangs and clattering. Static hum and the fizzing of overheated wires. Squeaks and creaks from all manner of devices. Shuffling feet in empty corridors and on pebble beaches. Insect and alien chatter. Some of it strays into nightmare territory some of it, especially the sections of absurd gibberish, have a comic element. It all hinges around an elusive alien terrain that creates an absorbing hallucinatory soundtrack. The Sleeping Moustache offers a lot of serious listening. You could listen for a month and still discover something new. Naturally highly recommended if you follow the work of any of the contributors or pine for early Nurse With Wound. ©

This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin.  The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks.  Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtapositions and jarring eclecticism are par for the course, just like the finest NWW of yore.

At its inception, Nurse With Wound was a group, not a solo project.  However, for the last 25 years or so, even with the large cast of collaborators and producers that have worked on NWW records, it has seemed like the sole autocratic creative domain of Steven Stapleton, lone surrealist wolf.  That's why its odd to see Stapleton involved in so much group activity lately, with active memberships in ensembles such as Scribble Seven (with Maja Elliott, Joolie Wood, Freida Abtan, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron), the Wounded Nurse Ensemble/Salt Marie Celeste live group (with Diana Rogerson, Potter, Liles and Waldron), and now The Sleeping Moustache.

The Sleeping Moustache is an adventurous fivesome consisting of Steven Stapleton, Jim Haynes of Coelecanth, Matt Waldron and R.K. Faulhaber of irr.app.(ext.), and Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson of Icelandic experimental group Stilluppsteypa.  There is no clue given as to who does what on which track, and in fact the album's packaging consists only of five primitive, apparently hand-stamped brown paper slips, each listing the five members of the group in a different order.  In the background are fragments of Dada-esque typeset dialogue: "Please sirs, could you help me onto the railings so I might leap to my death into the waters?" or "This malign energy issued forth unchecked, saturating the intimate and the mundane alike to twist the innocent contents of our lives into shapes of vivid, indescribable horror."  Each slip is backed with a small print by the artist listed on top.  Because of the lack of practical information given about the project, the sounds on this CD emerge as even more esoteric and inscrutable than they would have anyway, and it would be impossible to untangle each artist's contribution.  The only entity that can be held responsible for this album, then, is The Sleeping Moustache. 

The mind-blowing quality of production is a consistent thread running through this cracked, chaotic journey across unspeakably weird audio realms, remaining vivid and thoroughly fucked for the duration of the album.  The album plays like an abstract radio drama in which the narrative could never be turned back into sensible language.  Chilling drones and stereo-phased plinks and plonks stretch and dilate while tiny flesh-eating robots force a freight train backwards through a rift in spacetime.  Squeaking door hinges and creaking wood stairs slowly sink into a burbling peat bog at midnight, while a gas-fueled generator floods the scene with obscene fluorescent lights.  Outmoded machinery and monstrous disembodied spirits battle for supremacy against a backdrop of cosmically generated keyboard drones, which shudder and pulsate as they fester into glowing red sores that blasphemously belch and vent thick steam into the pipes of a church organ.  Heavily delayed voices utter foreign gobbledygook which bounces between the stereo channels,  farting beings of pure static who cannibalistically consume each other inside telephone wires.  Damp, evacuated warehouses serve as the setting for strange and awful ceremonies involving tesla coils, rusty steel beams and quivering electrified gelatin fingers slowly caressing articulated marionettes enacting their own doom.

Suffice to say, fans of classic Nurse WIth Wound will rejoice at The Sleeping Moustache.  It's a thoroughly enjoyable resurrection of the sort of classic 1980s audio surrealism that groups like NWW and HNAS perfected, worthy of repeated deep listening sessions on headphones. © Helen Scarsdale 

The artwork for the first edition of The Sleeping Moustache features five letterpress prints from each of the artists with an edition of 1700. 

• Matthew Waldron, Steven Stapleton, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Jim Haynes, R. K. Faulhaber ‎- The Sleeping Moustache (2008) - 320 Kbps

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