The Iron Soul of Nothing finds two titans of the dronescape getting together, not to battle but to conjure; an unholy rite on a blank, featureless plain, two robed figures joined by two mad hatters, trailing broken clockworks and unraveling spools of tape. Originally released in 2008, famed experimentalist Stephen Stapleton, this time joined by Colin Potter to form Nurse With Wound, re-envisioned the source material from Sunn O)))'s second record, ÃÃVOID (that's pronounced double zero void, if you were curious), pulling the rumbles scrapes hisses and howls straight from the baked 2" reels. TISON is now given a respectable 2 LP treatment that it so richly deserves, on Stephen O' Malley's Ideologic Organ imprint: you could get lost in the umber forest of the gatefold sleeve and the luscious frequencies locked in the grooves will have you levitating, drooling, and chanting!

Nurse With Wound take Sunn O)))'s patented paleolithic death march, which Stephen O' Malley and Greg Anderson were still perfecting on ÃÃVOID, rips out the conceptual skeleton and makes it dance like some necromantic marionette. On 'Dysnstaxis (a chance meeting with somnus)' NWW re-invents the track 'Richard', ripping it apart to a gaseous purr, a single repetitive guitar hit, what sounds like an armenian duduk, to create the feeling of some alien race, watching holo-reels of gypsy priests from their basalt pyramid spaceship.
'Ash on the Trees (The Sudden Ebb of a Diatribe' could be a lost Coil out-take and it reminds me of Julian Cope's druidry off of Sunn O))'s White One, with Pete Stahl from DC hardcore band Scream leading the ceremony, a slow guitar dirge suddenly washed out in shards of digital glass and then grinded down with a belt sander.
'Ra At Dawn (Rapture, At Last, Numbered By Her Light' sounds more like Sunn O)))'s more recent material, like something off of Monoliths and Dimensions, 25 minutes and 25 seconds of ominous modern classical music; gothic strings and floating tones. Gavin Bryar's Sinking of the Titanic, Philip Jeck's crackle, Ligeti's sorrow. Here's where the quartet's black light really shines, and they show that the avant-garde, in all its forms, be they metal, noise, drone, or electronic, have passed the spark from one acolyte to another, and they unwittingly show how utterly fucking brilliant that they are. Honest to god modern composition, sub-bass slow motion Black Sabbath guitars with oscillators flickering like ghost lights and unquiet spirits, dancing around the standing stones. Heavy, brutal, intelligent... yet these guys are still regarded head-bangers, knuckle-draggers. Add to this ceremonial brew Stephen O' Malley's wicked sense of graphic design, and here you have the sights and sounds of the future. True Art.