Having listened to a number of other Nurse with Wound records didn’t prepare me for the sheer outlandishness of Sylvie and Babs, widely touted as being one of the best NWW creations in the whole catalog. At the very least it was the most ambitious, requiring something like two and a half years of work and involving dozens of co-conspirators. The results are jarring even for existing NWW fans—perhaps doubly so for more recent converts rather than folks who have, so to speak, been with them from the beginning. “Stockhausen’s Hymnen on nitrous oxide” was one description; “K-Tel gone Dada” was how the record was described when it was still in progress—“one side being abstract, butchered versions of really famous hit records and the other is the ‘Beggar’s Opera’.”
The first NWW record in my life was A Sucked Orange, which turned out to be one of the worst places possible to start with the Nurse sound. That disc was little more than a collection of B-sides and outtakes, not all of them terribly distinguished, either, but it was at the very least a way of preparing me for just how fiendishly strange NWW could be. When I bought Babs, I brought it home at some ungodly hour of the night and listened to it twice through with my jaw dangling open for most of it.
