Nathalie Stern - 2019 - Nerves And Skin

Cruel Nature Records – CN126

 Nerves and Skin names the two territories through which every experience must pass. Skin is the border where the world first touches us: pressure, heat, injury, affection, air. Nerves carry that contact inward, converting the external world into electrical information that the hidden body can understand. Nathalie Stern builds this album in the space between those functions. Voices touch one another, synthesizer tones travel like signals beneath the surface, breath becomes rhythm, and feelings that might ordinarily be explained through narrative are instead allowed to enter through sensation.

Paul Hess’ cover makes that hidden process visible. A human torso has been opened to expose ribs, intestines, organs, and flowing internal structures, while an eye appears in the center of the chest as though the body has developed another method of seeing. Beyond it are branching cellular shapes resembling neurons, roots, veins, or organisms encountered through a microscope. The image refuses the comforting division between interior and exterior. Skin is no longer a complete boundary, nerves resemble landscape, and the body appears simultaneously vulnerable, intelligent, and unknowable.

The album behaves in much the same way. It is intimate without sounding small, exposed without becoming confessional in the ordinary singer-songwriter sense, and bodily without depending upon conventional acoustic naturalism. Stern’s principal materials are voice, a MicroKorg, loops, drones, and a limited number of carefully chosen collaborators. From those apparently modest resources she creates rooms that seem much larger than the person standing at their center.

Nerves and Skin arrived almost a decade after her first solo album, Firetales. That interval was not merely a long production schedule. Stern has described reaching a point where she had begun losing interest in her own music and deliberately setting her tools down while another direction formed. The decision matters because artists are often encouraged to continue supplying work even after the method producing it has stopped feeling alive. Stern did the harder thing. She waited until the language changed.

Her earlier history had included guitar-based groups such as the Swedish band Candysuck and the Newcastle group Lake Me, followed by years of solo performance in which traditional Swedish folk memory, vocal looping, and experimental electronics gradually moved toward the center. After roughly twenty years of playing guitar, she found that it no longer allowed her to write the music she needed. The MicroKorg replaced it, but the more important discovery was that her voice had been the true instrument all along.

That recognition gives the record unusual authority. Stern does not use electronic equipment to disguise limitations or imitate a full conventional band. The synthesizer supplies pulse, duration, darkness, and a surface against which the voice can reveal its physical character. Her vocals can be melodic, choral, whispered, percussive, disembodied, or multiplied into a group whose individual members all happen to originate in the same throat.

The live versions of these songs were constructed through real-time looping and sequencing. In the studio, Stern and MP Wood took many of them apart, isolating the components rather than simply recording the established stage performance. That change of method allows the album to expose its internal anatomy. A breath can be positioned independently from the phrase that once surrounded it. A harmony can acquire another voice. A bass trombone can enter beneath a loop and reveal weight that the original live arrangement had only implied.

This is not studio polish applied to spontaneous music. It is a second form of composition. Stern’s live process creates a present-tense architecture in which every layer must be performed, captured, and trusted before the next one can exist. The studio permits time to be opened and examined. Individual moments can be separated, collaborators can enter the structure, and a song can discover relationships that were impossible when one person had to operate the entire mechanism onstage.

“Here to Stay and Here to Belong” begins with breath. Before nationality, politics, residence, or belonging can be discussed, a body must establish that it is alive. A deep synthesizer pulse then appears beneath overlapping voices, creating a landscape both protective and unsettled. At more than seven minutes, it is the album’s longest piece and the foundation upon which everything that follows is built.

Stern wrote the song before the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, intending it as a love song to the country where she had established her adult life. After the result, its words became painfully literal. As a Swedish person long settled in Newcastle, the apparently simple desire to stay and belong had suddenly been placed inside administrative, political, and emotional uncertainty.

The song is strongest because it does not become a topical slogan attached to a date in 2016. Its deeper subject is the instability of belonging itself. A person can spend years making a home, building friendships, participating in a community, and loving a place, only to discover that official language may still classify that presence as provisional. Home exists socially and emotionally, but governments possess documents capable of casting a shadow across it.

Stern’s layered voices answer that uncertainty by creating their own community. No single vocal line has to prove its right to remain because the others are already surrounding it. Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch join Stern, widening the song from one person’s declaration into a small chorus. The music does not pretend that singing can settle an immigration status. It creates another kind of belonging, the temporary nation formed whenever several people agree to breathe and listen together.

This is one of the album’s central ideas: a loop can be a form of shelter. Repetition is sometimes described as imprisonment, the mind or machine trapped inside the same action. Stern uses it differently. Returning to a phrase can establish a reliable ground when the larger world has become unstable. The line comes back. The pulse comes back. The voice is still present. Each recurrence says that disappearance has not yet occurred.

“Because Science” takes the record from political uncertainty into cosmic uncertainty. The title sounds like a sarcastic shorthand used during online arguments, a phrase meant to close discussion by claiming rational authority. Stern instead repeats the opening thought from H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, in which scientific restraint is used to warn humanity away from knowledge hidden in Antarctica. Rational inquiry has opened a door that reason itself now wants closed.

The repeated text becomes increasingly detached from ordinary speech. Stern, Duncanson, and Gabrysch chant it until the sentence stops functioning merely as information and begins behaving like an incantation. This is an important reversal. Lovecraft’s narrator attempts to use language scientifically, documenting evidence and issuing a warning, but Stern’s repetition exposes the ancient fear already living beneath that formal voice. Explanation becomes ritual.

Hannabiell Sanders’ bass trombone enters this environment with astonishing naturalness. The instrument is named Tyler in the credits, a small affectionate detail that makes its enormous low voice feel almost like another character. Trombone can suggest ceremonial brass, industrial machinery, animal call, human lament, or something moving beneath a frozen surface. Here it seems to breathe below the choir, giving physical mass to the unseen presence the words are trying not to reveal.

The title’s humor protects the track from becoming costume horror. Stern’s relationship to occult films, strange fairy tales, and folk horror is genuine, but she understands that horror becomes less convincing when every object announces its darkness too solemnly. “Because Science” lets a phrase from contemporary argumentative culture collide with cosmic dread. The joke opens the door; the thing behind the door remains serious.

“Luchadora” returns attention to the body. The Spanish title names a female fighter or wrestler, someone whose survival depends upon knowing where force enters the body and how it can be redirected. The track moves through low, lurching percussion, electronic pressure, hissing breath, and vocal fragments whose repetitions feel less like a chorus than controlled exertion.

MP Wood’s percussion does not produce a conventional dance beat. It creates impact and recovery. Each sound seems to make the surrounding body adjust its stance. Stern’s breath becomes part of that rhythmic system, removing the usual distinction between the person performing the song and the machinery supporting her. The lungs are already percussion instruments; the microphone merely enlarges what is normally hidden.

The luchadora is an especially appropriate figure for this record because wrestling joins performance and genuine physical risk. The body becomes symbol, costume, spectacle, and vulnerable flesh at the same time. A staged identity may still receive an actual blow. Stern’s multiplied voice can likewise sound supernatural while remaining unmistakably rooted in muscle, air, saliva, fatigue, and nerves.

“Luchadora” never needs to announce a victory. Its power lies in continuation. The rhythm remains standing, the breath returns, and the track gradually makes endurance itself feel combative. Strength is not represented by making the voice invulnerable. It is represented by hearing vulnerability become organized motion.

“Ember Child” is the album’s first great contraction. After the extended opening environments and the physical struggle of “Luchadora,” two minutes and forty-six seconds of voice and piano create a smaller chamber. Nicky Rushton’s playing brings an acoustic warmth into the electronic landscape, but the song does not become a conventional respite. Its gentleness retains the knowledge of darkness surrounding it.

An ember is not simply a small flame. It is what remains after the visible fire has diminished, carrying enough heat for combustion to begin again. Joining ember to child creates an image of vulnerable persistence: a young life holding warmth inside an environment that may not appear warm at all. Stern’s lullaby-like delivery protects that spark without surrounding it in false innocence.

Rushton’s piano gives individual notes room to decay. Unlike a loop, which can return with apparent permanence, a struck piano tone begins vanishing immediately. “Ember Child” places Stern’s sustained vocal world beside that mortality. The voice can be layered and prolonged, but each piano note reminds the listener that sound is also disappearance measured through time.

The song’s small dimensions are important. Albums concerned with dread and ritual sometimes enlarge every emotion until intimacy is crushed beneath atmosphere. Stern understands that a whisper can carry as much consequence as a drone. “Ember Child” does not leave the album’s larger world. It reveals the tiny life being sheltered inside it.

“Then You Talk of War” begins from a different kind of threshold. The title places violence inside conversation. One person has been speaking, another introduces war, and the emotional climate of the room changes before any physical event occurs. War first arrives through language: threat, justification, memory, prophecy, fantasy, history. By the time weapons appear, words have often spent years preparing the ground.

A heartbeat-like pulse runs beneath the track, making the political subject bodily. War may be discussed through borders, governments, armies, and strategic abstractions, but its final location is always nerves and skin. It enters lungs, ears, sleep, families, and the learned reflexes through which bodies begin anticipating danger.

Sanders’ trombone adds weight without producing military grandeur. Brass instruments carry unavoidable associations with public ceremony, armies, funerals, and state power, but Tyler’s low voice here sounds closer to an organism enduring pressure than a fanfare commanding obedience. The choral layers rise around it, neither triumphant nor defeated.

Stern’s arrangement makes war feel like an infection of scale. A conversation becomes a room, the room becomes an institution, the institution becomes machinery, and the machinery eventually returns its consequences to individual bodies. The song remains compact because the title has already supplied the entire terrifying expansion. Someone talks of war, and suddenly every ordinary object nearby appears temporary.

“Deep Sleep” occupies the album’s most ambiguous refuge. Sleep should provide restoration, but the track’s wheezing drone and barely raised voice suggest a threshold from which returning is not guaranteed. Nicky Rushton’s piano, Sanders’ bass trombone, and the additional voices gather around Stern without dispelling the unease. The ensemble sounds like a group keeping watch while the central figure travels somewhere they cannot follow.

A lullaby normally establishes safety through repetition. The same melodic contour returns, assuring the listener that the caretaker remains nearby. Stern preserves this function while allowing the surrounding electronics to question it. The song may be soothing, but what is being soothed? A child, an adult nervous system, an illness, a fear of death, or the body’s resistance to surrendering consciousness?

Deep sleep is the point at which awareness of the skin temporarily diminishes. The world continues touching the body, but the conscious mind is no longer translating every contact. The album’s title therefore changes meaning here. Nerves remain active beneath sleep, maintaining breath, heartbeat, temperature, and the possibility of waking. The hidden system continues its work without requiring permission.

The track’s patience makes it one of the record’s deepest rooms. Nothing has to leap from the darkness to prove that darkness exists. A low mechanical breath, a distant harmony, and a melody hovering between nursery song and elegy are enough. Stern trusts the listener’s imagination to populate the empty areas, which is almost always more effective than explaining what lives there.

“Spectre” lasts only two minutes and twenty-three seconds, appearing less as a complete haunting than as evidence that haunting has occurred. A spectre is defined by incomplete presence. Something appears without returning fully to physical life. Stern’s method of recording voices is ideally suited to this condition because each overdub is the preserved trace of a body that is no longer standing at the microphone.

Recording has always contained an element of haunting. A person produces vibrations once; technology allows them to sound again after the originating moment has vanished. Vocal looping intensifies the uncanniness because the same preserved breath can continue beside the living performer who made it. Past and present versions of one person become briefly audible together.

“Spectre” makes that ordinary technical fact emotionally visible. Stern’s voice does not need theatrical ghost effects. The very act of hearing a human presence separated from its original time is already strange enough. The song passes quickly, refusing the ghost enough duration to become domesticated.

“Stig in Lucia” is the album’s most explicit meeting between Stern’s Swedish childhood and her adult experimental practice. Its opening section is based upon a traditional song she remembers singing at school. She has said that this first half remains close to the way it was performed then, apart from the drone now sounding beneath it.

Swedish Lucia observances are built around light entering the darkest portion of the year, with processions, candles, white clothing, and choral song. The ceremony is Christian, seasonal, familial, civic, and theatrical at once. For children participating in school, the tradition can enter memory before its historical meanings are fully understood. Melody and group singing arrive first; explanation follows later, if it arrives at all.

Stern retrieves that choral memory without preserving it beneath glass. The old song enters a drone, receives additional voices, meets MP Wood’s bass and guitar, and eventually crosses into increasingly forceful synthesizer sound. The track begins as recollection and ends as possession. Tradition does not remain safely in the past. It wakes up inside current technology and discovers that the new machinery can carry it somewhere the childhood performance could not.

This transformation avoids the politeness that sometimes weakens contemporary approaches to folk material. Stern does not merely sing an old melody clearly, add tasteful electronic ambience, and allow heritage to remain recognizable and well behaved. The second half reveals that inherited songs may contain energies their ceremonial use has disciplined rather than eliminated.

The title itself contributes to the slight dislocation. “Stig in Lucia” sounds almost familiar but not completely settled, as though a known seasonal ritual has been entered from an unexpected angle. That crookedness suits Stern’s memory. She is neither reproducing a definitive ethnographic version nor treating the tradition as exotic material discovered by an outsider. She is returning to something that once passed through her own body and asking what it has become after decades elsewhere.

Migration alters inherited music in ways that can be difficult to measure. A song sung within Sweden may feel communal and ordinary. Sung in Newcastle, it can suddenly carry geography, childhood, language, distance, and the knowledge that the singer has built another home. The melody has not changed, but its location inside the person has.

The track’s descent or ascent into synthesizer intensity also complicates Lucia’s symbolic light. Light is usually treated as safe, revealing, and morally opposed to darkness. Stern’s electronic illumination is more volatile. It exposes the body, overloads the nerves, and makes the old chorus appear less like reassurance than the opening of a channel.

“Interlude” follows as residue. The voices seem to wilt, fall away, or continue after their organizing ceremony has ended. Calling it an interlude suggests an interval between important events, but near the end of the record it becomes a necessary zone of decompression. The listener has passed through childhood ritual transformed into electronic force and cannot be moved directly into the closing statement without an altered silence between them.

The track demonstrates how little Stern needs in order to establish place. A human voice weakened, reversed in emphasis, or left without its expected harmonic support can make a room feel enormous. The absence of a conventional lyric does not reduce meaning. It redirects attention toward the voice’s material condition: air becoming vibration, vibration being preserved, and preservation slowly losing its human outline.

“A Life” closes the record with an indefinite article. Not “Life,” which might promise a universal statement, but one life among many. The title acknowledges both singularity and limitation. Every life is complete from inside itself and one small event from the perspective of history.

Duncanson and Gabrysch return, making the ending communal rather than solitary. This matters after an album that has repeatedly multiplied Stern’s own voice. The difference between overdubbed self and actual collaborators can become difficult to hear, which is part of the record’s quiet philosophy. Identity remains real, but no voice develops outside other voices. Family, school, bands, places, traditions, political events, friendships, and remembered songs are already present inside the supposedly individual singer.

“A Life” does not require a spectacular conclusion because the album’s central process has been continuation rather than conquest. Breath has moved through ten different structures. Voices have gathered, separated, returned as spectres, carried tradition, confronted war, entered sleep, and constructed a home. The final track leaves the listener with existence itself, neither diminished by mortality nor inflated into a promise of transcendence.

The collaborators form another body around Stern’s body. Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch appear on six tracks, contributing voices informed by Newcastle’s experimental Noize Choir culture. Their participation makes the harmonies feel social rather than merely multiplied through studio technique. Hannabiell Sanders’ bass trombone supplies breath converted into brass vibration, a second respiratory system beneath the singers. Nicky Rushton’s pianos introduce strings struck by felt-covered hammers. MP Wood brings impact, low-frequency foundation, guitar texture, and the engineering decisions that determine how close every body appears.

Each contribution is physical. Even the synthesizer is operated through pressure from fingers, converted into voltage, sound, and speaker movement. Nerves and Skin refuses the lingering idea that electronic music is disembodied. Its electronics are extensions of touch. Buttons, keys, pedals, cables, microphones, and loops form an external nervous system through which one body communicates with another.

The apparently simple synthesizer tones are therefore a strength. Stern does not bury them beneath excessive processing in order to make the technology seem mysterious. Their buzz, pulse, and raw surfaces remain audible. The machine is not pretending to be weather or orchestra. It is allowed to be an electrically powered object responding to human hands.

This directness makes the album more timeless than an elaborate display of fashionable production might have been. Folk music and basic electronics share an unexpected durability. Both can be carried through relatively modest means. A song requires memory and a voice. A minimal synth pattern requires a small machine and electricity. Neither needs the full industrial apparatus of commercial recording in order to begin.

Stern’s use of loops also belongs more closely to folk practice than first appearances suggest. Traditional songs survive through recurrence. A melody is repeated until a community remembers it, then changed slightly as new voices carry it forward. Looping performs this process within one performance. The first phrase becomes inherited material for the second phrase, even when only seconds separate their creation.

The crucial difference is that technology remembers exactly while people remember creatively. Stern works between those conditions. The loop returns with mechanical reliability, but every new vocal placed beside it changes its meaning. Exact repetition becomes the ground for human variation.

This is why her music feels rooted without becoming revivalist. The traditional element is not limited to the Swedish song quoted in “Stig in Lucia.” It is present in the understanding that voices gathered around a repeated form can produce a social and psychological space larger than any individual singer. Folk tradition becomes method rather than decoration.

Folk horror enters through a similar route. Stern has spoken of her lasting attraction to strange fairy tales, occult films, and stories in which familiar landscapes conceal older forces. Nerves and Skin contains darkness, but its horror is not imported as a bundle of visual symbols. There are no obligatory crows, antlers, village sacrifices, or samples from old public-information films. The unease grows from ordinary human systems: belonging, scientific inquiry, fighting, childcare, war, sleep, memory, seasonal ritual, and mortality.

Each of those systems is necessary, yet each can become frightening when examined long enough. Belonging creates the fear of exclusion. Science reveals knowledge the discoverer may not be prepared to carry. Sleep restores life by imitating its absence. Childhood songs preserve warmth while reminding the adult that childhood has vanished. Skin protects the body while proving how easily the body can be reached.

The record’s horror is therefore inseparable from tenderness. “Ember Child” could not feel vulnerable without care surrounding it. “Here to Stay and Here to Belong” hurts because the attachment to home is genuine. “Deep Sleep” becomes uncanny because lullabies are intended to protect. “Stig in Lucia” becomes powerful because Stern has not rejected the childhood tradition she transforms.

This mixture gives the album an unusual emotional integrity. Darkness is not treated as more intellectually serious than love, and beauty is not offered as proof that danger has disappeared. The two conditions continually occupy the same sound. Harmonies can be gorgeous while the drone beneath them remains threatening. A bass trombone can suggest a creature and a grieving human breath in the same note.

The geographical relationship between Sweden and Newcastle runs quietly through the whole album. Stern’s identity is not divided into a traditional Swedish half and an experimental British half. Newcastle’s musicians, studios, labels, and communities have become part of the work, just as Swedish choral memory and folk structures remain present within it. The album does not choose between origins and arrival. It creates a third territory from their overlap.

That territory is particularly audible in “Here to Stay and Here to Belong.” Political language often demands that migrants explain where they truly belong, as though attachment can be measured through one birthplace and one passport. Music is less obedient. A voice can carry childhood school songs, decades of guitar playing, North East friendships, European anxiety, horror films, electronic instruments, and the acoustics of a Gateshead studio without arranging them into competing national compartments.

Belonging becomes something constructed through repeated participation. One stays, sings, helps, listens, collaborates, attends other people’s performances, and becomes part of the local memory. The additional Newcastle voices on the album are therefore more than guests. They are audible evidence that home has already been built socially, regardless of the uncertainty imposed from above.

Cruel Nature Records was an appropriate home for the cassette because the label has consistently allowed experimental music from the North East and far beyond to coexist without forcing it into one marketable genre. The tape’s limited edition of seventy-five copies gives the album another skin: a white plastic shell enclosing magnetic material upon which electrical signals have been physically arranged.

The white vinyl and CD editions provide other bodies for the same nervous information. Vinyl converts sound into a groove that can be touched but is damaged by careless touch. Tape holds magnetized particles that slowly change through age and playback. The compact disc makes the information optically readable while remaining vulnerable to surface injury. Every medium has skin, memory, and a particular way of deteriorating.

That material vulnerability suits an album concerned with preservation. Stern waited almost ten years between solo records, but the music does not sound anxious to compensate for absence through excess. It behaves like something that needed to reach its final form before being given a body. Once pressed, duplicated, or transferred, it can travel independently of the person who made it, carrying her breath into rooms she will never enter.

Nerves and Skin is often described as ethereal, haunting, or gothic, all of which identify genuine qualities. Yet those words can make the album sound less physical than it is. This is not mist floating above the ground. It is lungs, fingers, vibrating reeds, struck strings, abdominal breath, electrical current, magnetic storage, and the minute muscular adjustments required to hold several voices in tune.

Its most supernatural effects emerge from ordinary anatomy. One throat becomes a choir. One breath returns after it should have vanished. A remembered school song passes through decades and appears again beside a synthesizer. A voice recorded in Gateshead reaches a listener years later while the body that produced that exact sound is somewhere else entirely.

Technology does not remove the human presence. It reveals how strange human presence already is.

The album’s restraint is equally important. Stern never fills every available frequency simply because the studio permits it. Silence remains active around the loops. Guest musicians enter where their particular physical color changes the structure, then leave before the arrangement becomes a demonstration of abundance. The record knows the difference between expansion and crowding.

That discipline allows the voice to remain central without becoming dominant. Stern does not use virtuosity to stand above the other sounds. Her greatest skill is making the voice function as environment. It can become wall, floor, weather, companion, warning, or the faint light by which another instrument is recognized.

By the end, the title no longer feels like a poetic abstraction. Nerves and skin are what the record has been playing all along. Nerves are its loops, signals, pulses, and invisible connections. Skin is its breath, contact, pressure, voice, and recording surface. One carries the message; the other determines how deeply the message is felt.

Anyone who witnessed Stern constructing these pieces live, participated in Newcastle’s Noize Choir community, remembers the traditional Lucia song from childhood, or knows more about the sessions at the Soundroom may hear further bodies inside the record. Those memories would be especially valuable here, because the album understands that no voice exists alone. Every sound touches another surface, and every surface sends something inward.