Volume 2. Eight enigmatic episodes from Utvær. A double CD in a full-colour 6-panel digipak. Between June & July 2004, as guests of Kunst I Nordland, Nurse With Wound broadcast twenty four unexpected radio transmissions from the Arctic Lofoten Islands. Seven of these transmissions are included on this double CD, packaged in a six-panel digipak. Bringing no instruments, they were left in the tiny fishing village of Svolvær with minimal equipment, and told to get out and make whatever they wanted, sonically, out of their experiences of exploring the islands. The only catch was that three times a week, their work in progress had to be aired on the local radio station, Lofotradioen. Lofoten never darkens in summer.
The air was saturated with the background reek of drying cod, and the headless fish could be seen everywhere, dangling from huge wooden drying racks all over the island. Exploratory walks around the streets of towns like Svolvær, KabelvŒg and Henningsvær revealed strange homemade garden trolls, elves, organic effigies: knotty carved guardians of domesticity that reverberate with a deep and rich pagan history. Every single sound you hear is sourced from environments and objects in Lofoten: buildings, ships, harbourside tackle, local characters encountered during the period of abandonment on the island. The broadcasts began with relatively untreated material but as the weeks went by, and our poor sailors became more and more hallucinatory, sounds, voices and textures are increasingly distorted, maltreated, mashed into a singular and vivid vision of a community and a place far outside the scope of everyday eyes.
Listen for the gulls and terns, squeaking in the background. Or the sounds of marching bands and crowds at the local music festival, 'Codstock'. The clanging hulls of fishing trawlers and the metallic paraphernalia of a dockside becomes a thundering rhythmic pulse. Voices drift in and out, from visiting arts officials to Lofoten's more invisible community, like the Namibian refugees Steven and Colin befriended in an apartment on the edge of town. Velkommen til Utvær. Welcome to Shipwreck Radio
