Erroneous: A Selection of Errors

This is a deeply strange album on multiple levels. The first level of strangeness has to do with its origins. It is credited to two bands: the Italian experimental ensemble Larsen, and Steven Stapleton's longstanding Nurse with Wound project (the latter augmented, in this case, by Kraftwerk founding member Eberhard Kranemann, who records under the name Fritz Mueller). In fact, the program is simultaneously a split album and a collaboration: it consists of one long track by Nurse with Wound, two shorter ones by Larsen, and collaborative reconstructions of all three tracks, for a total of six. The program opens with Nurse with Wound's 16-minute-long "Tickety-Boo," an epic track that opens in a creepy, arrhythmic mode before suddenly blossoming into a sort of Middle Eastern funk that would sound right at home on a late Muslimgauze album; eventually the two sounds blend together. The program ends with Larsen's two original tracks, the first of which ("Call Me, Tell Me") puts a dense carpet of guitar noise over frenetic but regular drumming, and the second of which ("Bug Vaudeville") is relatively contemplative, simple, and pretty. In the middle of the program fall the three collaborative deconstructions: "Driftin' By" is an aptly titled remix of "Tickety-Boo," one that takes selected elements from the original track and stretches them into a thin and gauzy but surprisingly attractive exercise in ambience; "Rock Baby Rock" is similarly soothing, and completely mistitled unless you mean "rock" in the sense of rocking a cradle; "Cob-Kite Toy" brings a certain creepiness back to the proceedings, but is quite attractive itself as well. As experimental music goes, Erroneous is generally easy on the ear, and offers frequently interesting and even surprising textures.