Labradford's Mark Nelson sounds effortless on his latest slow-burn album of lonesome drift music or "romantic minimalism" as he calls it, highlighting again why he's more or less in a category all of his own in the modern canon. Influenced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois' smudged half-speed Americana, Nelson is at the peak of his powers on a delicately windswept set of desert ambience and candlelight blues.
'The Patience Factor' was written thru isolation in 2020, and might be the most restrained suite of solo compositions he's assembled in years. There's no hesitation or overwork in his notes - like Neil Young's 'Dead Man' soundtrack, it sounds as if Nelson is playing along to visuals, improvising fluidly as desolate, widescreen landscapes pan across his field of vision. Unlike many of his previous albums there are also no drums, and Nelson's voice is absent; he doesn't need embellishments - he's carving moods from desert cliff faces.
When he helped Labradford play foil to post-rock's deluge of quiet-loud hardcore posturing, Mark Nelson was admirably out of step with the popular flow, and when he struck out solo with his eponymous Pan American debut in 1997, it felt as if he was reshaping downtempo trends without a care for the zeitgeist. Thankfully he's a few paces left of popular ambient trends now too, so when he uses reverb, radio static or tape fuzz, nothing sounds as if it's been caught in the snowball of post-Netflix nostalgia - it's just another color in his palette. The shimmering tremolo on 'Outskirts, Dreamlit' feels as if it shares spiritual kinship with Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins, while 'The North Line' sounds like Loren Mazzacane Connors, or John Fahey pitched down to a crawl.
