#mark nelson

[oldschoolfrp]

When you're fighting troglodytes on a winch lift and a bulette tunnels into the room and you remember this platformer lets you throw barrels (Mark Nelson, I believe, Greyhawk Adventures supplement WGR1: Greyhawk Ruins by Blake Mobley and Timothy B Brown, TSR, 1990)

[spaceshiprocket]

Martian Manhunter by Adam Hughes and Mark Nelson

[warcraftconceptart]

Retainer Jitaen Artist: Mark Welson World of Warcraft TCG: March of the Legion (2007) Image cropped from a card scan provided by the WoW TCG scan project

[thefugitivesaint]

Mark Nelson, ''Midnight Graffiti'', #4, 1989

[panelswithoutpeople]

Dead Things Rot from Hellraiser No. 13

by D.G. Chichester, Mike Mignola, and Mark Nelson

[retroscifiart]

Art by Mark Nelson for the Aliens comic series (Dark Horse, 1988)

[dustedmagazine]

Pan•American — Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane (Kranky)

An aura of motion pervades Mark Nelson’s latest album, as rhythms shimmer and electronic (or electronically altered) sounds sparkle like broken glass. When I reviewed 2022’s The Patience Fader, I observed that, “Pan•American slows time to a liquid crawl,” but this latest set of songs nudges the clock forward subtly. “Entrance to Afterlife” booms with the album’s most emphatic drumming, a marching band just out of earshot as ecstatic synth washes surge and recede. Yet drum rhythms chitter and glitch through even the most ambient, atmospheric cuts here, jabbing “Heaven’s Waiting Room” with an elbow, hissing and popping through “Silver Tramway (In Snow)” to keep things moving.

That’s perhaps in line with Nelson’s statement that he wrote these songs about travel. He says he means both ordinary, physical travel (of the “get in the van, man” variety) as well as more metaphorical life journeys. Still, you have to sense the balance tipping towards the mystical when three of the ten track titles refer to the afterlife (and four if you count “Taxi to the Terminal Gate”). This last one is full of long, lucid sounds, some breathy and organic and wood wind like, others polished to an electronic gleam; a subtly clicking, scratching rhythm ticks on through all this, as water washes through in big splashes.

Mallory Linnehan, who performs as Chelsea Bridge, is the only other musician besides Nelson on this album. You can hear her violin in “Silver Plane, Now Boarding,” a mournful, Celtic skirl, rough as wool against the pristine hyper-reality of the guitar and electronics.  Her voice turns up in “Death Cleaning” alongside Nelson’s in a lovely murmuring interval, introspective and dream-like.

Yet it is mostly Nelson, pushing past his normal slow-blooming, guitar atmospherics into a lighter, brighter, more electric future. It is mostly pretty subtle, but effective at higher doses, too, as in the punching, rolling, Talk Talk-by-way-of-Adrian-Sherwood, “Entrance to Afterlife.” It sure doesn’t sound like Pan•American, but oh boy, it moves.   

Jennifer Kelly

[the-girl-who-loves-monsters86]