Mark St.John Ellis founded the record company De Nova Da Capo in 1990. He studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art because of not having the qualifications to go to art college, where he wanted to go on to design album covers. Shortly after leaving LAMDA and having formed, according to Melody Maker, " the doom laden drum machine and feedback guitar " band 'Masque', the project became dissatisfied with playing the London rock venues and became 'Theatre of Masque’. The project title described the physical theatre performance group it had become, inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud. The venues became art galleries and theatres.
He then started to compose music for pieces of theatre and film, whilst working with the photographer Daniel Faoro in photographic stills and super 8mm film. The two then collaborated on a twenty minute film set to music, 'Philosophy with a Hammer', based on the Baroque imagery of Caravaggio and De la Tour. This was previewed in the Bijou cinema Soho, London in 1990. Alan Trench from World Serpent Distribution was in the audience that night and as a consequence of the screening, an album distribution deal was offered. Later the film was released in VHS format worldwide.
In 2013 the secondary project N-A-G was created to cater for the different musical direction that this period of time was exploring. From 2018 the works of Elijah’s Mantle were revisited with edited new arrangements and a new series of generic album covers was created by nagDesign and the graphic designer Liam Furlong to form a Collection. In that same year Mark St.John Ellis engaged in a project exploring sounds with bowls, samples and his voice which became side tracked by the Arts Council funded soundscape project The Empty Vessel, with the voice of Catriona O’Leary and then the version with the international composer and singer Lisa Gerrard which became the film video. Mark St.John continues to curate and design spaces for the visual arts, film and sound.
