 Bill Nelson Bill Nelson's discography is about as easy to navigate as the cavernous halls of Gormenghast, and it's about as impossible to comprehend. I latched on to his ambient record Chance Encounters in the Garden of Lights in '88 or so, and it's so endlessly good that I would love to get some more. But then I look at the 70+ albums the guy has released in the past 20 years and immediately decide I'm good with the one. Nelson has created music of many styles, but it's the ambient stuff I love. His soundscape is a forested dreamland where Brian Eno, Kitaro, and Philip Glass play in the moonlight, tittering like woodfaeries. 🤷 There's also a dash of Adrian Belew in there, that is, Belew at his most serene ("Matte Kudesai" off King Crimson's Discipline), and a kinship with Bill Frissell. Fluid, slippery guitar lines, entrancing tape loops, comforting synth pads made of 100% goose down … it's stuff to drift away to, whether it's just for a nap or your first successful wrist-slashing. Pavilions of the Heart and Soul was originally released in '84 as part of a four-album set called Trial by Intimacy—it was reissued individually in '89, along with the others in the set. Just who was funding his prolific output is not known to me. And whether there are many other true gems to be found in his catalogue, I can only guess (yes). Pavilions is certainly one, not quite Chance Encounters, but still quite good. I stumbled across it and the other Intimacy albums at a used CD shop, and upon playing Pavilions, instantly regretted not buying the others. Of course they were gone when I went back. The flow on this one is broken a bit by the rather unaccomplished "Four Pieces for Imaginary Strings," which just sound like Switched On Bach for the early MIDI generation. But these are short, and soon it's back to the soothing weirdness that sounds alternately proto-Boards of Canada and backing-track-for-Chris-Deburgh. It's precisely Nelson's unusual balance between spot-on fortunetelling electronica and comfortably dated '80s-isms that makes me love this stuff so much. You'd think he'd routinely hear his praises sung by electronic musicians, but without the third-party credibility that provides, the only people I can even remotely interest in listening to him are those tiresome King Crimson fans, of whom I know far too many. Someday, though, he'll emerge suddenly as an influence on someone "important," and his garden of delights will be explored anew. It would be all too sad if Bill Nelson's sole champion in the world was me.
Review by La Fée |