The Exhaustion of Influence
On Lists
Let’s call this a visual essay. What follows is a series of image-lists and list-images, that I’ve captioned. There’s obviously much more I can say about this, and I have, but for now I just wanted to share these images. In the archives, I have an unpublished academic article on the Nurse With Wound list—several versions in fact, papers I’ve delivered at conferences and symposia but never nailed down sufficiently to submit for publication. Each version shifted the focus, but the impetus was always wanting to write about the Nurse With Wound list.
The so-called “Nurse List” is a list-image consisting of the names of nearly 300 artists, originally included with the 1979 debut LP of the British experimental music project Nurse With Wound (NWW). According to Steven Stapleton, the original intention behind the List was as an extended ‘thank you’ to the artists who inspired these non-musicians to produce a record, instilling in them the audacious concept that neither virtuosity nor technical knowledge were necessary requirements to produce worthwhile music. And yet, in the decades since its creation, the List has often been described as a wish list for collectors of obscure, experimental, and outsider musics, gaining a particular currency in the peak years of the mp3 blog (which I would date 2004-2012, roughly from the start of OiNK to the seizure of Megaupload, more or less coinciding with the life of the influential mp3 blog Mutant Sounds). As a wish list, the List assumes a canonical function (despite Stapleton’s intentions otherwise), offering one possible genealogy linking the amateur production of electronic music of the 1970s and ‘80s as part of a longer tradition of the avant-garde.
The avant-garde genealogy implied by the List invites an historiographic reading, taking into account how changing social conditions have altered what counts as music and which lineages register as influences. One of the most striking aspects of the Nurse List is the near total absence of Black artists—a fact which commentators consistently fail to comment on. Though the influence of Black radical music is apparent in various ways, I find this omission to be indicative of a broader problematic of cultural appropriation in Euro-American avant-garde practice. In my unpublished paper, I read the open “wound” tearing across the image of the List as an invitation to reconsider the “whiteness” of the avant-garde in relation to the Black radical tradition. I argue that in fact the music of NWW shares certain formal qualities with the music of artists excluded and omitted in the construction of such a historical narrative (namely dub, free jazz, and hip-hop), and look to socio-cultural factors that have sustained these arbitrary categorizations. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Prelude: On Art
Lists have a complicated but often venerated role in the history of 20th century art and music. The first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, famously portrayed the web of modern art in his ‘Cubism and Abstract Art Diagram’ in 1936. Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art Diagram” eventually came to be criticized for being excessively teleological.
Hank Willis Thomas gave the list a ‘postcolonial update’, revealing the colonial assumptions that have been reproduced by the power of MoMA. As Hrag Vartanian writes, “Like colonialism itself, this version of history is in service of one thing: justifying the dominance of modern European civilization, even if, as in this case, it is focused on a particular cultural movement.” (Hyperallergic) Thomas’s update draws attention to the way Modernism found influence in non-Western cultures and practices while simultaneously erasing those influences.
Fluxus pioneer George Maciunas achieved something much more ambitious with his intermedia Expanded Arts Diagram in 1966, in which Fluxus was the focal point. Maciunas’ list-image is a relational digram, with its explicit articulations of connection between various actors and movements.
Relational webs of influence have become one of the defining modes of visualization in contemporary digital culture. MoMA explains, “Vectors connect individuals whose acquaintance with one another in the period 1910–1925 could be documented. The names in red represent those figures with the most number of connections within this group.” Part of what is so interesting here is the broadening of the narrative beyond received narratives. Hrag again: “This web of relationships goes beyond visual art to incorporate musicians like Claude Debussy, writers like Guillaume Apollinaire, and choreographers like Vaslav Nijinsky, and gives us the most complete picture of abstractions transcontinental roots we’ve ever seen.” Hrag also wonders if this image will become as iconic as Barr’s. While I accept their usefulness as tools, such visualizations fail as visual diagrams. They’re not iconic, but instantly dated. (Hyperallergic)
MUSIC
Jann Haworth and Peter Blake’s Grammy-award winning cover for the The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band famously depicts dozens of influential figures, including gurus, occultists, actors, performers, and composers: Crowley and Yogananda, Gandhi and Marx, Jung and Einstein, Stockhausen and Dietrich, Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, and so on. (Complete list here.) One can speculate as to the intention, but the somewhat cryptic nature of the image—many of whom are partially or mostly obscured—might be understood as an image-list, inviting the viewer to puzzle over it. Unlike the fine art diagrams above, any relation between these characters is implied at best.
Many artists have since followed in the Beatles’ footsteps, with homage covers of their own. The cover of Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow, nearly four decades later, capturing the diversity of “New Weird America” and the “freak folk” scene, reflecting the diversity of influences on Banhart’s sound. In a contemporaneous review, Brandon Stosuy writes:
Banhart offers a composite photo of "The Family" (a term he often ascribes to his musical friends), gathered beneath a large knotty tree and accompanied by the disembodied heads of smiling spirits. Sgt. Pepper is the obvious point of departure, though unlike the Beatles' classic, there are no numbered silhouettes in the liner notes to decode the relative anonymity of the photo subjects. Fittingly, the only immediately recognizable figure is Banhart himself, crouching front and center, wings spread wide.
The point isn’t being able to decode specific influences, then, but to present a vibe.
Tribe knows all about vibes. The American hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest took the form to a different place with their third album, Midnight Marauders, which features dozens rappers, producers, and DJs across its front and back covers. (List) In retrospect, the face-forward grid recalls the hyperrealism of Zoom meetings. Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists identifies 71 different hip hop figures, from the iconic to the unknown. These include many NY hip hip legends, including the Native Tongues crew of which Tribe were a part (alongside the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul), but also artists from the West Coast, from the underground, the mainstream, and beyond. (Despite the inclusion of both Stetsasonic and De La, noticeably absent is DJ Prince Paul, but word is this wasn’t an intentional snub.) Writing for Complex, Andrew Noz describes the cover of Marauders as one of hip hop's "last grand displays of cultural unity as the Coastal fallout loomed imminent," and before the “Jiggy” era signaled a decisive realignment between the real and the commercial.
The list has had an especially fraught place in popular music journalism, with ‘best of’ lists a reliable generator of discourse no less in the Twittersphere than in the record store. It was even the format of Greil Marcus’s Stranded, a classic collection of criticism organized around the theme of the ‘desert island disc’. Lists can be put to various uses, as indexes, taste makers, and evidence of connoisseurship.
Freak Out!, the debut from Frank Zappa’s The Mothers Of Invention, was released that same year. Inside the gatefold cover it reads, ‘These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them’, followed by a list of 179 key influences. Zappa himself is included on the Nurse List, and surely his 1966 list of obscure artists was an inspiration on Stapleton’s own 1979 list.
The Nurse List, from horizon to canon
The so-called ‘Nurse List’ was first included with their 1979 debut album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, released on their own United Dairies label. The following year, a slightly expanded version of the list was included with their sophomore LP, To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl. The list consists of the names of approximately 291-298 artists or groups (depending on how one counts) printed in a standard typewriter font on a square sheet of paper. The flow of text is interrupted in such a way as to resemble a tear or a cut made diagonally across the paper from right to left, with an additional, smaller cut below to the right on 1980’s expanded list. The NWW logo, in white Fraktur1 font against a black background, occupies the space of the cut in both official versions of the List. Upon closer inspection, the edges of the logo are made of seemingly random, overlapping letters and numbers, an intimation that the list is itself a form of auto-destruction. The first line is taken from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden—step out of the space provided.’ In 2019, this line was taken by the London label Finders Keepers Records for their new series, Strain, Crack & Break, collecting tracks from the most obscure, out-of-print artists features on the Nurse List. This is indicative of the influence the list has accumulated over the decades, cementing its reputation as the Bible of obscure and experimental music.
According to Stapleton, the original intention behind the List was as an extended ‘thank you’ to the artists who inspired these non-musicians to produce a record, instilling in them the audacious concept that neither virtuosity nor technical knowledge were necessary requirements to produce worthwhile music. And yet, in the decades since its creation, the List has often been described as a wish list for collectors of obscure, experimental, and outsider musics, gaining a particular currency in the peak years of the mp3 blog (which I would date 2004-2012, roughly from the start of OiNK to the seizure of Megaupload, more or less coinciding with the life of the influential mp3 blog Mutant Sounds). As a wish list, the List assumes a canonical function, offering one possible genealogy linking the amateur production of electronic music of the 1970s and ‘80s as part of a longer tradition of the avant-garde.
The inclusion of figures such as Luigi Russolo (to whom the album itself is dedicated), John Cage, Jean Dubuffet, Dieter Roth, Yoko One and Alvin Lucier speaks to intentions that have as much to do with contemporary art theory as with music. Well-known musical acts including Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Crass sit alongside composers Robert Ashley, Luc Ferrari, Stockhausen and Xenakis. Incorporating figures from modern art, the avant-garde, conceptualism, Fluxus, musique concrète, rock, psychedelia, improvised, and electronic musics, the List was perhaps the first articulation of a now standard genealogy of sound art, one which ignores traditional disciplinary and institutional divides.
From Fothergill’s perspective, “what enabled [them] to listen to far more, and to experiment much more widely, was the astonishing pricing policy of Record & Tape Exchange, particularly at the Goldborne Road branch, where unsold records were marked down at monthly intervals until they were priced at 10p. Virgin had a whole section of Krautrock but we mostly picked up stuff secondhand.”2 With a foundation built on marked-down records, by the early 1970s Stapleton was embarking on weekend crate-digging trips around Western Europe obsessively searching for newer and stranger sounds. The dominant influence came from the so-called ‘Krautrock’ and Kosmische music scenes of West Germany, of note because of the German post-war generation’s intense determination to create their own sound, one independent of American influence and distinct from post-war German pop, or Schlager music.
Despite this range, the bulk of the list consists of an obscure collection of ‘60s and ‘70s ‘electric experimental music’, including avant-garde classical, psychedelic, industrial, proto-punk, electronic, free jazz/free improv, no wave, Krautrock, library music, and the generally uncategorizable. Though a few American and Japanese artists are included, the artists overwhelmingly hail from Europe, particularly the UK, Germany, France, and Italy. (The List, one might not be surprised to learn, is also overwhelmingly male, Yoko Ono being the most prominent exception.) At its initial moment of reception in 1979, however, released just as Margaret Thatcher was being sworn in as Prime Minister, the Nurse List seems not to have been about obtaining knowledge, but about the seduction of the unknown. The dehumanized machine rhythms, uniforms, and anonymity that characterized Industrial music stood in stark contrast to the hyper-individualism of the Thatcherite era. Nurse With Wound’s unique music stood seemed as much to transcend this torrent of artists as being indebted to them.
In fact, the List initially seems to have had an anti-canonical orientation consistent with broader 20th century avant-garde practice. By including the list with their debut, created in the early years of a liberatory moment in which non-musicians could for the first time produce and distribute recordings independently, NWW were explicitly foregrounding the question of influence. As Paul Hegarty writes, ‘The overall form of Chance Meeting is not to encourage knowledge as possession, but knowledge as process, involving mystery and loss of control.’ (Hegarty 2008: 17) This relationship is altered by the ease of discovery, collaborative research, and file sharing enabled by the Internet, transforming the function of the List itself and highlighting its conspicuous absences. These absences, however, are apparently not so conspicuous as they should be, and it precisely in the overlooking of these absences, or worse, their dismissal as trivial, that I aim to scrutinize.
These differing historiographic uses of the list allow us to excavate from its cracks an alternative history of electronic music, one which looks beyond the institutions of the Euro-American tradition by attending to the shifting modes of production (of music), rather than on an analysis of the aesthetic or formal concerns of the avant-garde. The genealogy posited by the List can be read symptomatically, as an expression of the troubled relationship between avant-garde sound practice and race, as one of the most striking aspects of the list is the near total absence of black artists. Though the influence of black radical music is felt in various ways, I find this omission to be indicative of a broader problematic of cultural appropriation in Euro-American avant-garde practice.
I read the open ‘wound’ tearing across the image as an invitation to reconsider the whiteness of the avant-garde in relation to the Black radical tradition. In critiquing these omissions, I will consider the formal qualities of NWW’s compositions, textual evidence from the List and liner-notes, statements made by the artists in interviews, and sociological and cultural histories of the broader scene in which they were embedded. I trace the influence of NWW and the circulation of the List in fan-zines, magazines, college radio, and Mail Art networks (which fostered and cultivated the global cassette culture of the 1980s), and especially on the Internet and throughout the mp3 blog era, including prominent features in such diverse publications as Mutant Sounds, Discogs, WFMU, the BBC, and the Wire.3
1978-80 may have been too early to expect Nurse With Wound to have encountered and understood the importance of Dub or Hip Hop. And in fact, Stapleton has since become a vocal fan of hip hop for decades now. But how could these self-proclaimed fans of free jazz include (white) artists from leading labels, such as ESP-Disk’ and Black Saint / Soul Note, but still fail to include any artists hinting at the important influence of Black radical music? Where are artists and ensembles like Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and any members of the AACM?
Animal Collective’s Panda Bear seems to have recognized the problematic nature of these omissions with this list included with his third solo LP, Person Pitch, a list which includes a wider variety of genres, including rappers and techno producers. But should we be trying to produce a “fixed” or more inclusive version of this list? As this list never generated very much interest, I’m inclined to suggest that would be a fool’s errand.
In fact, the Nurse List initially seems to have had an anti-canonical orientation consistent with broader 20th century avant-garde practice. By including the list with their debut, created in the early years of a liberatory moment in which non-musicians could for the first time produce and distribute recordings independently, NWW were explicitly foregrounding the question of influence. As Paul Hegarty writes, “The overall form of Chance Meeting is not to encourage knowledge as possession, but knowledge as process, involving mystery and loss of control.”4 This relationship is altered by the ease of discovery, collaborative research, and file sharing enabled by the Internet, transforming the function of the List itself and highlighting its conspicuous absences. These absences, however, are apparently not so conspicuous as they should be, and it precisely in the overlooking of these absences, or worse, their dismissal as trivial, that I aim to scrutinize.
By the late 1970s, particularly with the release of the SONY Walkman in 1979 (Japan) and 1980 (world), conditions emerged for an amateur production of sound works. Many of these practitioners were working completely without any reference to the academic traditions of the earlier parts of the century. Other references included electronic music of sci-fi soundtracks and the BBC Radiophonic workshop, crossover records by artists such as Brian Eno and Robert Fripp (of King Crimson), and the freedom exemplified by British psychedelia and German kosmische music (which was actually a crucial influence on Brian Eno himself.) These are the stories that are told today, at least, which tend to leave outliers such as the aforementioned Halim El-Dabh, or pioneering female artists such as Pauline Oliveros or Eliane Radigue out of the narrative, either willfully or because such artists are only now able to find an audience. Pioneering Jamaican dub producers, such as the electric engineer turned sound system genius King Tubby or the reggae producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, tend only to receive their due in discussions of the birth of hip hop or the evolution of electronic dance music. Like Teo Macero’s production for Miles Davis, however, the influence of the techniques they pioneered extend far beyond.
In 2020, a list compiled by scholar, composer, and trombonist George Lewis went viral, a list of black composers whose work has never been programmed by the Darmstadt. The center of New Music in the 20th century had only included three Afrodiasporic artists or performers until recently, prompting Lewis’s list. In “A Small Act of Curation,” Lewis writes
I draw here upon composer, improvisor, and musicologist Dana Reason’s powerful notion of the ‘myth of absence’, which she uses in her 2002 study of the art world of experimental improvised music to summarize her finding that lack of press coverage and festival programming of the works of women leads to the automatic assumption that women are not present in the field in sufficient numbers to matter. Thus, at the Defragmentation conference at Darmstadt I moved to drive a large sound truck right over the myth of absence and right through this glaring hole in the historiography of contemporary music, by creating a listening/viewing space in which a large-screen video monitor, two-channel sound system, and comfortable seating and lighting invited visitors to experience a four-hour sound and video loop consisting entirely of the work of Afrodiasporic composers active since 1950.
The emphasis on living composers is crucial here, since Lewis is at least partly concerned with the inequality, in living composers inability to make a living off their work. All too often, black artists and composers only get their flowers after they’ve passed.
As Lewis has argued at length elsewhere,5 such divisions are difficult to account for in purely aesthetic terms, and instead become sociological matters. As a trombonist and composer, Lewis’s work with computer-controlled improvisation is groundbreaking, but he also has decades of history as a curator. He relates some of his experiences booking at The Kitchen, a venue that showcased much of New York’s ‘downtown’ scene. Lewis was curator from 1980-1982, and his predecessors included Rhys Chatham, Arthur Russell, and Garrett List. It was during List’s time as curator—from 1975-1977—that the Kitchen first began to program jazz and improvised music, including artists such as Don Cherry and Anthony Braxton. List, a white man, was a classically trained trombonist whose interest in jazz gradually developed into a deep engagement with free jazz and avant-garde composition, and by this period he had been collaborating with Braxton as well as La Monte Young, John Cage and Musica Elettronica Viva (all of whom, for what it’s worth, appear on the Nurse List).
Rhys Chatham notes that when List first began programming jazz at the Kitchen,
it caused quite a stir. People would say, ‘Those people already have a place to play; why are you bringing them here?’ But Garrett wanted to make a point that there’s no hierarchy between this music, that there shouldn’t be a pyramid where classical is on top, jazz is somewhere below that, and rock doesn’t even register.6
Lewis took this tendency even further with his programming, later reflecting on his tenure “as helping to shift the debate around border crossing to a stage where whiteness-based constructions of American experimentalism were being fundamentally problematized.”7 Press outlets such as the Village Voice and the New York Times placed the emphasis on the inclusion of improvisation, while the jazz publications “took little, if any, notice of the events at the Kitchen.” Despite years of musing about the necessity of border crossings, John Zorn’s experimental “operas” or electro-acoustic combos evaded critical attention.8
By way of a provisional conclusion, it is important that I be clear about what the Nurse List is not. Compiled by Stapleton and Fothergill, the list is not a manifest of all the records they owned, which at that time already numbered in the thousands. The two argued over which artists should be included, and took the construction of the list quite seriously. In a letter to a fanzine after Chance Meeting’s release, Fothergill muses on the avant-garde and Free Jazz, in order to explain why NWW prefer anonymity and in order to carve out their own project in relation to these established forms. He argues that avant-garde classical was lacking any “aesthetic feeling” for the sounds being used, and lambasted composers for their reliance on abstract concepts, an opinion that also extends to Conceptualism in art. He explains that NWW found much free jazz/improv to be limited by its insistence on total improvisation (which is not quite true), and more so by restricting themselves to traditional jazz instrumentation. “We see our music as sound sculptures unhindered by preconceived ideas, where any sound may be used whether natural or manmade, untreated or treated electronically, and motivated only by aesthetic considerations.”9 Though I have much sympathy for this desire, I find problematic the assumption that “aesthetic considerations” have no social bearing. Still unexplained by this appeal is that fact that, although Fothergill specifically assails the work of John Cage as ‘contrived and boring because it was composed to an abstract concept’, Cage still appears on the list. One might argue that the influence of John Cage is unavoidable given his direct relationship to the European artists and composers, but this is no less true of John Coltrane.
NOTES
Fraktur, a blackletter typeface, has a long association with German nationalism and has come to be associated with Neo-Nazi groups in its contemporary usage, though it is by no means confined to use in said contexts.
David Keenan. England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground.(Wembley: SAF, 2003): 56.
To name a few: Soundohm, an Italian mail order website, has a NWW List section; RRRecords distributed bootlegs of United Dairies tapes; Brick and mortar shop Torn Light Records in Cincinnati has a NWW section; NYC’s venerable Other Music often used NWW list as a shorthand in their famous capsule reviews.
Paul Hegarty. “Just what is it that makes today's noise music so different, so appealing?” Organised Sound, 13, 01 (April 2008): 13 – 20: 17.
Cf. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (1996), “Experimental music in black and white: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985” (2001/02), “Afterword to ‘Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,’” (2004), and A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008).
Rhys Chatham. “RHYS CHATHAM SHARES HIS LIFE STORY.” Self-titled Mag. 2013. Emphasis mine.
Lewis 2008: 384.
Despite a MacArthur “Genius” Grant or occasional validation in art world contexts, such as the inclusion of Zorn’s “Theatre of Musical Optics” in the Whitney’s Rituals of Rented Island.
Quoted in Keenan 2003: 63.
Thank you for the fantastic essay. I thought to speak up for the Panda Bear list; if it was ignored, perhaps it has more to do with those very same elitist attitudes in the avant garde/experimental circles towards an indie/electronic artist. I would also not close the door of history on the impact that such a list could generate over a longer period of time, as new fans discover in it new horizons of sound and unexplored connections