n0teeth didn't log onto slick and profitable web domain "mister dash internet dot biz" this evening to bore you with a lecture on the fairly well-covered convergence of dub and industrial music, but if you'd like to quickly refresh your memory before we get down to business, knock yourself out:
I want to talk about one act in particular that has, apparently since the 90s but especially in recent years, successfully merged some of the most out-there and alienating elements of both genres to create something unique. Prolific Lancaster-based Nurse Predator aka Adrian Hughes carries out ice cold industrial dub maneuvres in stiflingly warm, pitch black car park stairwells, the piss-stained, fag end-strewn and blackened chewing gum-encrusted concrete illuminated by brief flashes of harsh white strip lighting synthesiser.
The musical inventiveness on display here can't be understated, from the double bass sound on Raging Red recalling the jazz influenced liquid dnb of the late 90s to the extremely subtle distant acid squelch on Radiotherapy like faintly overhearing a rave in a nearby building muffled by thick concrete walls. To my ears this is a completely fresh and original take on the micro-genre: it ain't Mick or Justin's industrial dub although production wise it does owe just a little to Adrian Sherwood's way with a kick drum, eschewing the Birmingham lot's murky claustrophobia for crisp, clean drum tracks and an unnerving contrast between light and dark, open and closed space. The atmosphere being generated here can be favourably compared to the heightened sense of menace and unease oozing out of every single one of Portion Control's creative pores since since their post-Y2K reunion, or some of the Black Dog's blackest moments.
Beyond the bleak, grey landscapes of urban Britain that Nurse Predator conjures up on first listen, we learn more about the artist's own story through releases like the anagrammatic Days Of Idle Rage, an album inspired by (and possibly recorded during?) a spell at the now-abandoned Ridge Lea psychiatric hospital in the 90s and Hughes' lost and dearly missed friends from that era. It's SPK's Callan Park backstory if the founding members of the band had, like the members of its German namesake, been patients rather than staff.
Elsewhere Hughes pays tribute to his departed mother with some of his most poignantly beautiful sonic experiments yet.
There is nothing more impressive than an artist who can impart so much personal detail and bare their soul like this through completely instrumental music, especially when the surface appears so cold and impenetrable. Delving deeper into Nurse Predator's back catalogue has been a revelation, like smashing through the steel-shuttered windows of the derelict asylum and reading the stories inscribed on its walls.