Nu Creative Methods – Superstitions (1984)

Unvinyl #14

Let’s take the long way round and start with Nurse With Wound, a key name from the first wave of British industrial, well known to anyone with a taste for abrasive, unconventional sounds. That’s our starting point for a very specific reason: beyond making music, they were obsessive vinyl hunters, especially drawn to anything difficult or somehow avant-garde.

We’re talking late ’70s here, when tracking down albums outside the major-label circuit had more points in common with smuggling than with record shopping. You either relied on specialist import shops or ventured on the occasional record-hunting trip. Legend has it that Steven Stapleton and company even organised proper “vinyl expeditions” abroad. Sounds crazy, but it would explain how they became aware of underground acts from all over Europe at a time when tape trading was often the only alternative distribution network available.

They famously compiled a massive list of their favourite artists, first included with Nurse With Wound’s debut LP and later updated for the second album. Over the years, for many listeners (myself included), that list became a sort of guide to discovering one obscure name after another. Nearly 300 names appear on it, ranging from progressive rock (with a strong Italian presence) to krautrock, free jazz, contemporary classical, and the earliest industrial experiments.

Among those names was the French duo Nu Creative Methods, who at the time had just released their debut LP ‘Nu Jungle Dances’ (a second would follow in 1981). And they are the real reason we’re here.

What Pierre Bastien and Bernard Pruvost attempted was bold: a skewed, noisy, occasionally tribal take on free jazz, built not only on conventional instruments but on deliberately hacked ones. Plus, African percussion, toys, alarm clocks, and whatever else could be coaxed into producing sound. After the two LPs mentioned above, a third work appeared in 1984, released only on cassette by the Italian label ADN under the title ‘Superstitions’.

Compared to the earlier records, this tape drifted even further from jazz. Its four tracks (five on the CD reissue) move through improvisations that lean heavily toward pure noise. What remains of ‘music’, if we can still call it that, are just a few melodies that emerge here and there. ‘Tabarikala’ is perhaps the clearest example: a noise-driven backdrop, achieved through entirely analogue means, topped with a twisted, hammering cornet trying to sketch out something resembling a melody.

It’s not for everyone. But for that small circle of listeners drawn to extreme sound, a release like ‘Superstitions’ offers a chance to rediscover a time when experimentation was still driven by enthusiasm and by the desire, perhaps a little naïve but certainly genuine, to push boundaries and take chances regardless of the outcome. Motivations that today too often give way to paroxysms for their own sake, perhaps dressed up (in bad faith?) with some awful pseudo-intellectual pretensions.

Chances of vinylization: Unlikely. The original cassette can still be found for reasonable prices, but the 2013 CD reissue by the Italian label Musique à La Coque is even cheaper and easier to get hold of. A note on Discogs mentions that the CD reissue was done without asking for permission from the owner of the master tapes, so that makes the possibility of further re-releases rather uncertain.

🟥 Unvinyl is a series of articles about great music not available on vinyl (at the time of writing). A full index can be found here.