In The Nursery - Scatter

I cannot help listening to my feelings in trying to evaluate objectively IN THE NURSERY. Their music has something melancholy, poetic, even supernatural, about it and after all is said and done it is still music composed out of love, at the same time brotherly and cosmic. I can only close my eyes and start dreaming about the time when dreams become reality. With love, from here to eternity.

Giovanni Meli / Firenze

I've never come across another group where it's so crucial to recognise the individual components which make up the whole. Yet to describe the impact of IN THE NURSERY, you have to embrace all aspects of their work - their sound, their artwork and their live performances. They create a perceptual pattern of infinite and exquisite beauty which cannot be described as simply a sum of its parts. Their endeavours, in every aspect, are the ultimate seduction of the senses.

Kristan / Paragon Records

"I like IN THE NURSERY because...

The 'old boy network' should be supported...
'To The Faithful' cleared the floor at the 'KU' club in Ibiza...
They swim against the tide...
They're polite and always than you in advance...
I've always been a sucker for a military snare...
Their version of 'Haunted Dancehall' is a thing of great beauty...
I've always been a sucker for an epic synth line...
They look good...

Andrew '11th hour' Whiterall
Wardour Street, London. 17:10 11/04/95

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek
to rediscover through the detours of art,
those two or three great and simple images
in whose presence his heart first opened."

ALBERT CAMUS

I love IN THE NURSERY. Maybe it's the way they present themselves on stage, commandingly in charge but a little but vulnerable with it. Maybe it's the sumptuous artwork they clothe their recordings in. Maybe (Fuck! No, surely not?) it's the recordings themselves. Maybe it's the trousers.

I love the way they don't 'fit in' (the group, not the trousers). They're influenced by the 60's (but it's the 1860's ha! ha!) and you could call many of their compositions classical (but not in a 'Hey Hey We're The Minimalist's kind of way). Show them a guitar and they'll probably show you the door (but it'll be a very stylish door) and for Christ's sake don't ask to borrow their drum kit for your next gig down at The Pig And Ferrest (unless you're an octopus).

I love to watch the news on TV. In the old days of Reginald Bosanquet and Anna Ford, I wish the programme announcer, just once, said, "And now the news from ITN, tonight read by Klive Humberstone and, uh, Nigel Humberstone." Sadly, it never happened and these days I watch the news on the BBC. That's life.

Which brings me to Camus' quote. Obvious but well chosen. And ultimately true. The evocative, cinematic yet uncomplicated art of IN THE NURSERY conjures images of memory and desire, ritual and romance, war and peace and images of other images. And, important only within a 'rock' context, their truly glamourous music can help you forget the latest golden shower of preening pop poseurs masquerading as our new gods for this week.

I love IN THE NURSERY. Theirs is a music of permanence, just like the fondest images.

Gary Levermore, London

UNDER BEN BULBEN

Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the code a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here's the gist of what they mean.

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all,
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
"Send war in our time, O Lord!"
Know that when all words are said
And man is fighting man,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurements began our might;
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine's Chapel roof,

Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens have opened.

Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toc to top,
Their unremembring hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the day
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye, on life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Yeats, September 4, 1938

'THIS IS WHEN YOUR CHEST IS LIKE A CATHEDRAL, WHEN EACH BREATH FLOWS, CHARGED WITH THE MYSTERY OF SOULD; AND INTO IT TREMBLES THE WHOLE EDIFICE, FOR YOU TO SEE DEEPER INSIDE, AS A CELLO FAINTS AWAY...

THEN THIS IS WHEN YOUR EYES CAN CROSS, WITHIN THAT UNFORGETTABLE SECOND - A PERMANENT MARK ALIKE -, THE COLOUR TASTE OF YOUR OWN BELIEF.'

Music is the language of the soul: the perfect, divine instrument which directly addresses to our hearts. Discovering ITN's music has been like a slap on my soul. It had the same effect on me when I first read, Hermann Hesse's "Demian".

I've always been charmed by the music's magic; but then I have listened to a lot of different music. Beauty lingers in the miracle of the note. There is a supplementary spark in ITN, the beautiful music is from living people; people who dream under the same skies... It was so different from the feeling when I listened to Mahler or St Saëns, Orff or Wagner, for there, for the first time I found something as hazy, as wide and as brilliant as pure spirit - the soundtrack to the Outsider's quest, and minde -, and something I could refer to, some companionship after all.

Stepping always further into the exquisite anatomy of ITN's sounds, I have been collecting the emerging thoughts and pictures, crossed throughout those intimate moments, quoting them all in booklets and tried to capture sensations in the colours, on canvas.

Transported bu this music one can feel all the fervour and the belief and the communion with something wide and immortal, transparent and timeless in which you sense your own soul, stripped to the core, clanging into it. And there, naked, one can taste both eternity and unity that taints ones initial self. That's because as true art and true beauty, ITN's music gives something and feeds that soul of ours, under that skin, under that sun...

"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses, by means of the soul... And you will see..."

Dominike Duplaa, Paris Jan., MCMXCV A.D.

The songs of ITN are like friends that accompany you throughout the years. The records are like photo-albums, they preserve a certain moment and they will stay like that forever. But in concert it is like meeting these old friends in person, they have grown older and they have changed, like in real life the songs go through a development over the years, they grow and collect more experience, but are basically the same old chaps. And like in real life you meet new friends and same old friends have to leave, but will always be remembered through their presence in the albums.

Holger Hanraths / VUZ Records, Duisburg, Germany 06.02.95

TO THE FAITHFUL

In memory, those autumn days seem eerie and intangible,
like atmosphere-heavy scenes from a fifties detective film.
The days were hazy and rainsoaked, the crumbling
streets diffused with an aqueous, orangy light.
I was naive, allergic to everything, and
in love. Dazed and drunk with it.
I stumbled around town,
a sleepwalker, thinking of him.
Sometimes, mornings, I'd lumber
onto his front steps. I'd search his mailbox
or spy through a window spiderwebbed with frost.
Once I whispered blue air onto its glass, began to
scratch a confession of love, then chickened out.
Instead I telephoned, and when his voice
spoke hello I started the music.
I imagined the mechanics of his
ear honing in; the horn, the plucked
violin, the snare snapping like sweaty hands
against stretched skin. "One by one, our hearts return."
Looking back, I'm uncertain how these words connected
to how I felt. And looking forward I see this memory held dearer,
expanding, just like as his beauty expands within the cocoon of that song's notes.
It, and he, still leave me breathless, blissed out, stunned.

Scott Heim / New York 12/94

'Huntdown' must rate as my favourite ITN track. We worked from a very loose structure of pre-programmed drums and built that up with layers and layers of found samples. In those days you couldn't sequence the playback and I remember the hours we spent just physically triggering a Bel sampler, choosing the points to record on the 2 inch tape. We had a diverse collection of sources - a little bit of Richard Harris' voice from the film 'This Sporting Life', gunshots from 'Dance with a Stranger', vocal arias snatched from Radio 3 and an excerpt from Bela Bartok, which we reversed. Gus Ferguson played some cello over thre track: his improvised playing enhanced the overall feeling of confusion and tension. The track was given its name 'Huntdown' when someone came up with the idea of using a pair of walkie talkies to record Klive's voice. One mouthpiece was set up in the studio's live room and a microphone positioned, he then sat alone inside the room with headphones and 'transmitted' vocal morse code, reminiscent of the radio broadcasts in Jean Cocteau's 'Orphee'.

Nigel

MYSTÈRE

Mystery - you are my mystery
The essence of what I see -
of what I perceive
Mystery in that I don't
Hidden mystery - deep inside
Look deep, look far - seek mystery
Hidden mystery
I see you naked, I see
I see, I feel nothing inside
Conceal yourself - within you veil
Produce the unknown -
secure the seal
An elusive puzzle -
waiting to be solved
Waiting to reveal the truth -
the real meaning
Waiting
Waiting together
we can discover the real mystery
The mystery that still evades -
that final mystery
That mystery of life
Waiting

"Music gives nameless nourishment to our emotions and memories" Jean Cocteau

As to your music, it's hard to say why I enjoy it. I think it's largely because it refuses to fit any definite category, but is unique in its own right. To begin with, I like music to induce something akin to a hypnotic trance - deep relaxation united with a feeling of insight - and your music does this for me. But of course, anyone who has tried to write about why certain art has such and such an effect is up against the brick wall of language. I can only say that my basic taste in music is 'classical', although I appreciate jazz. I have virtually no interest in 'pop'. And your music gives me the sense of 'saying' something that I find in serious composers, rather than the attempt to appeal to a crude physical sense of rhythm, as so much pop music does. Yet it is as accessible as a dance tune. What is interesting is that it fits in so well with my favourite poetry. What I mean is this. A lot of my favourite poetry doesn't actually appeal to my mind, my rational intellect. In fact, I disapprove to the rather 'wet' attitude in many poets like Dowson and early Swinburne. Yet I can place my rational mind at rest and deeply appreciate their poetry as a kind of verbal music, a perfect combination of sound and sense. Your music somehow appeals in the same way. I am aware that it is basically 'romantic' - a kind of 'Outsider music' - and that my own romantic period lies behind me forty years or so, yet I can enjoy it on its own terms as I enjoy a good painting or a good novel.
Enough of trying to express the inexpressible!
Colin Wilson / Cornwall 13 Dec 94
"In an age of flux ITN's music constitutes an invitation
to lose yourself in timeless contemplation of infinity.
Carnivals, ceremonies and rites are over.
ITN's music colours pearls and illuminates diamonds"
Giancarlo Costamanga Turin 6/1/95

Man has to believe in myths. Like wisdom, myths foretell the destiny of man. Imagine a lonely boy, with a 'Song of Destiny' on his lips and the 'Deathwatch' in his eyes.