Pan American - A Quiet Flow

Pan•American's is a rather strange story. When, in the summer of 1997, Labradford guitarist and singer Mark Nelson decided to go solo, one might have expected a one-off project, to be set aside once Labradford returned to record a new album. In light of Nelson's now more than decade-long solo career, it's safe to say that assumption was way off the mark: five albums, whose sound breaks decisively from the parent band while, paradoxically, bringing into focus a continuity of intent.

But ultimately, what do Pan•American's records sound like? Put simply, one could say they draw on ambient stylistic tropes; but it's in the ingredients, the blend, the final result that Pan•American heads toward a rather original sound, the product and consequence of various influences that shift from album to album. Undisputed cornerstones of Nelson's approach are 1970s German kosmische muzik (think Schulze and Tangerine Dream), ambient music — with Eno, obviously, as its undisputed master — the minimalist school, and, as the most novel element, the fusion of dub and minimal electronics that was so successful in the Nineties (think Aphex Twin).

The debut, Pan•American, released in 1998 under the Kranky banner, has a structure heavily influenced by the dub-electronic works that were enjoying great success right around that time. The emergence of a sinuous, lysergic sound comes through clearly on the self-titled album. Across the nine tracks that make up the record, for a total running time of about fifty minutes, the air feels rarefied, thin on oxygen. Nelson sketches seamless landscapes that dissolve beyond a thin blanket of fog, making everything seem to float before our eyes. And it hardly matters that timid dub warmth reveals the occasional ray of sunlight ("Lent"), because it seems hard to break free from that curtain of drones.

Icy analog breezes, delivered via synth, coat the earth in frost.

The world Nelson paints on his debut feels like an endless permafrost. And anyone hoping to find a bit of sun (on "Lake Supplies" or in the tightrope-walking of "Tract") had better brace for the thunderous finale: "Part One" is a wall of pitch-black drones, murky dark-ambient that fades out under distant screams worthy of the best Pan Sonic.

The album thrives on excellent moments, coming across at times as immature, but hinting at plenty of room for growth. The evolution from Labradford's electronic post-rock to the ambient music of the dub and minimal-electronics era has begun.

Two years later, almost simultaneously with a new Labradford release partly influenced by his solo experience ("E Luxo So"), Mark Nelson returns to his project, delivering a gorgeous album: 360 Business/360 Bypass. The six tracks making up the record's hour of music represent the refinement of the ideas found on the debut, now bolstered by flashes of genuine brilliance. 360 Business/360 Bypass is what we might call a total album: smoothing out the admittedly minor rough edges of the debut, Nelson achieves an almost perfect blend of dub tension, hinted-at jazz spasms, ambient solemnity and electronic touches.

"Steel Stars", with a faint Aphex Twin flavor, opens with an astral loop of limpid beauty, eleven minutes in which you can breathe in the scent of clean, transparent melodies, of images reflected in the icy waters of mountain lakes. But that loop, which radiated so much brightness, gradually begins to slow down, generating unparalleled cinematic tension, until it disappears in the finale. "Code", which can effectively be considered a continuation of the first track, captures the dark side of "Steel Stars": a heavy gait, dense and murky sound, and vocals (here featuring special guests Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low) that push the sound toward territory bordering on trip-hop. And while "Double Rail" updates ambient music for the age of jazz across twelve claustrophobic minutes, yet lit by parallel beams of light that seem to run from ear to ear like sharpened blades, the sonic universe of "Coastal" plunges into a cosmic void, made up of small timbres, calm but obsessive loops and dense sonic weaves, which lead into "K Luminate", a track built on rock-solid patterns that at first seem disjointed before settling into a uniform beat as the melody develops.

If it were possible to sum up this album in a single track, the choice would inevitably fall on the closing "Both Ends Fixed". Eleven minutes in which Nelson theorizes a warm yet icy void whose jazz veins attempt to fill it without ever quite managing to, a void that reveals itself to be universal. Release, openness, reconciliation, expansion. There, in four words, lies the essence of Pan•American: the void, 360 degrees around.

Just as 2001's "Fixed: Content" brings the artistic arc of Labradford to a close, Pan•American, besides becoming Nelson's main focus, tends to seek a reunion with the band's trajectory, becoming its conceptual offshoot and substantive artistic continuation.

The first signs of Nelson twisting already-trodden ground, developed with his usual acumen, can be found on the subsequent The River Made No Sound, which from the opening track, "Plains", shows a more composed approach with more pronounced ambient traits. Here too there's no shortage of the dub rhythm of the early works, dull and steady on the two lengthy tracks "Settled" and "Red Line", but mostly softened, rendered almost inert by visionary, descriptive expansions, dotted with a whole array of processed sounds that make the record's many facets pulse with life. The dense blanket of fog that enveloped Pan•American's early compositions begins here to thin out, making room for landscapes that are seemingly calmer, whose branching into a thousand streams begins to outline the traits of a "metropolitan nocturne" in which everything flows, channeling sleepless electronic lapping and rounded acoustic notes into a single current, like those that dominate the ending of "Raised Well".

Although not yet fully defined, The River Made No Sound shows the first signs of Nelson's ambient dub evolving toward cinematic music, one that travels along two parallel tracks: underlying uniformity and the constant insertion of heterogeneous elements, creating sonic layers of subtle tension and impalpable calm.

A direct and more accomplished development of The River Made No Sound is the subsequent Quiet City (2004), which marks a pronounced return to the use, alongside the usual ambient drones, of traditional instrumentation, thanks also to the collaboration of musicians from different backgrounds such as Charles Kim (Boxhead Ensemble), Tim Mulvenna (Vandermark 5) and David Max Crawford (Wilco): the result is a balanced mix of live and digital elements, in which the pale warmth that Mark Nelson has always tried to render in music is made vivid by a more pronounced human component, here enriched also by his own voice, whispered, hushed or barely hinted at, which embellishes the compositions and recalls, from the very first listen, the sinister emotions and captivating allure of the magnificent self-titled Labradford album.

The album's eight tracks (for a total running time of around forty-five minutes) make up a slow, largely homogeneous sonic flow, consistent with Nelson's new compositional vein, already revealed by the opening "Before", which draws the listener in with the essential elements of the current Pan•American sound, namely guitar and voice suspended over a liquid bed of drones that here no longer represent the load-bearing element of the compositions, but merely their murky connective thread.

The actual shift in sensibility becomes evident in the tracks made fuller and more articulate by the presence of percussion and horns, enriching the reverbed or electronically filtered guitars, as in the case of the visionary "Het Volk" and "Skylight", a track with unusually high frequencies and tones. "Wing", on the other hand, is the only track that stands in clear contrast to everything said so far: nine minutes of monotone, persistent electronic hiss, over which only occasionally do more structured elements seem to layer, destined however to soon disappear into an iterative sound, almost devoid of movement.

The essence of the work nonetheless remains ambient and markedly cinematic in inspiration, made up as it is predominantly of dilated, hypnotic episodes, depicting anonymous dim-lit spaces or sterile interiors - like the ones shown in the video versions included on the album's accompanying DVD - in front of which one is meant to sit in meditative solitude. The fundamental difference compared to the previous albums is then to be found, even more than in the instrumentation, in the approach, now warmer and more enveloping, yet still prone to restrained emotions and a subtle melancholy, in which, after all, it seems comforting to take refuge once the lights grow dim and the noises of the city gradually settle into quiet.

Having now completely abandoned the dub framework of the early albums in favor of the splendid ambient-acoustic drift of Quiet City, Nelson changes course once again, considerably upending the expectations of those who had let themselves be swept away by the dim, crepuscular-metropolitan glow of the previous work. Released in 2006 by the small Austrian electronic label Mosz, For Waiting, For Chasing once again weaves together electronic and live elements, only here the sonic manipulation occurs in a predominantly dissonant key, running through seven rather thorny and structurally complex compositions, often built through the gradual layering of drones, acoustic reworkings, electrical hums and impromptu field recordings (among them the prenatal heartbeat of Nelson's son, present in every track), transferred into a context in which the very distinction between notes, rhythms, sounds and noise ends up vanishing.

The contours of Pan•American's music continue to be undefined and elusive, its pace slow but steady, both when it rises to peaks of stark abstraction (as in the case of "From Here" and the brief interlude of distant beat and drone alone, "Still Swimming"), and when it distantly recovers the fascinations of 360 Business/360 Bypass, turning them, on "Dr. Christian", into mere accompaniment to dirty, rarefied electronic sounds. This is precisely where the main difference from Quiet City lies, since while on that album measured, ethereal sonorities created a deep, brooding post-industrial stillness, here they give shape to unsettling shadows, to dark, cramped landscapes, diffusely sketched and culminating in the claustrophobic, spectral "The Penguin Speaks". It is instead the closing "Amulls" that stands out as the only light, more expansive composition, thanks to the contribution of sweet piano notes dripping down, which, intersecting with a placid backdrop, give the track touching, soundtrack-like garb, certainly on par with some of the most moving episodes of the previous work.

Despite Nelson's usual attention to detail, For Waiting, For Chasing turns out to be a somewhat too cerebral and at times cryptic work, positioning itself on a different emotional plane from its predecessor: where that album struck straight at the heart, inspiring a warm surrender to the peaceful flow of thoughts and emotions, For Waiting, For Chasing instead tends to seep slowly into the recesses of the nerve endings, distilling notes and noises whose admirable subtlety requires greater patience and a certain effort of concentration to be savored. Perhaps this is why the intense, ethereal romanticism of "Amulls" shines, almost by contrast, like an unexpected gem in a work that, beyond an only superficially cold and complex appearance, does nothing but mark its author's further step in the uninterrupted search for varied and never banal electronic-ambient contaminations that has always constituted the essence of Pan American's music.

Three years later, Nelson returns to his home label Kranky and to an ambient-acoustic dimension not so far removed from that of Quiet City with his sixth solo album White Bird Release. This is not, however, a retracing of old steps, but rather an evolution marked by continuity: the album, as usual quite elaborately structured, moves with its customary smoothed-out gait, alternating floating soundtrack-like passages with sinuous jazzy timbres, which in a couple of passages dust off primal dub excursions. Rounding out the broad array of cadences and modulations that populates Nelson's sonic universe, a homogeneous yet ever-shifting blend of real rhythms, faint electric distortions and acoustic bass and vibraphone sounds runs unbroken throughout the album.

Crossing variables whose nature recalls both his established imprint and his more recent soundscapes, the American musician's formula unfolds in a placid, uniform motion, rippled by muted beats and broad astral trails, oscillating between drone, acoustic fascinations and placid dub echoes, all distilled into a fluid, homogeneous musical substance.

With White Bird Release, Nelson continues his arc of transformation, offering a further key to understanding a solo output that delivers a new, significant demonstration of peaceful and elegant accomplishment.

The fluid, sinuous ambient music of the early days has, in fact, come album after album to take on a whole series of ripples, which on Cloud Room, Glass Room (2013) take the form of brightly colored tempera brushstrokes, impressed upon a livid, dissolved watercolor.

Right from the title, devotion to the genre's most traditional forms is honored once again, albeit with a new twist: the glass room, an intimate and delicate space, sounds almost like a reduction to bare essentials of the airport from which everything was born. But that cloud hovering in the air manages at the same time to mark a break with the world of Brian Eno, in favor of a teeming swarm of rhythmic whispers and suspended microsounds.

The starting point thus sounds like a full-fledged, gradual takeoff, complete with the expected hesitation: "The Glass Room" is a synthetic flow à-la-Stars Of The Lid that at first flows limpid, propelled by a sublunary dub rhythm, before starting to be surrounded by gaseous nebulae, ready to solidify into frail stalactites by the end. From the hazier tributaries of this opening statement, the vapor clouds that envelop "Fifth Avenue 1960" take shape, smoothed by even more rarefied reverbed electro-acoustic crackles (Loscil docet), while the torpor of "Relays" turns them into liquid form, hiding the first symptoms of nostalgia within the guitar distortions of the backdrop.

The cosmic darkness of "Laurel South" marks Nelson's only bow to his earliest ambient explorations, while the sinister dub sparks of "Glass Room At The Airport" - a conceptual but not sonic trait d'union with Eno - and the drizzle amid luminous flashes of "Project For An Apartment Building" go on to bring the room's sounds into the native land of ambient music and to design an expansion of the starting room. Closing things out, laconically, is the drawn-out, meek crescendo of "Virginia Waveform", whose backward-looking distortions are framed within yet another livid rhythm.

A record that perhaps tends to suffer, emotionally speaking, from its own formal perfection, which makes it, at least in places, too cold and calculated. Nevertheless, it is a notably courageous effort, as well as yet another quality result for a musician who, since 1998, has still not suffered a genuine setback.

With the adventure at least temporarily over, Mark Nelson calls back his former Labradford companion Robert Donne, along with drummer Steven Hess, to launch the new project Anjou. The first Anjou (2014), however, doesn't do much to set itself apart from the latest offerings of Pan American.

The second Epithymia (2017) raises the stakes with three small masterpieces of ambient art: “Culicinae”, opened by a relay of glitches, never quite manages to escape the rhythmic stereotype of Terry Riley-style minimalism. The wreckage of intergalactic trails that follows, at a Popol Vuh-like peak, then implodes into a simple romantic sonata. The misty expanse that opens “An Empty Bank” hosts a distracted duet of trumpets, one martial, the other muted, from which volleys of fire rise up, while in the background the cosmos intones a hymn to the transformation under way. The third track, “Georgia”, opens grandly on organ dissonances and electronic distortion racing at the speed of light. The duel becomes almost too cerebral when a swarm of tribal percussion kicks in, reduced to mere ticking. A typical, flawless Kranky-style album, with no real upheaval either, but one that still knows how to alternate watercolours and nightmares thanks to a dense, alchemical interplay between the three.

In 2019 the Pan American project returns with A Son (Kranky), an eclectic album that holds together various stylistic and emotional cues and impulses. 2022 brings a more homogeneous work, as well as a more poignant and emotional one. The Patience Fader (Kranky) is as quiet as a meditation, as structured as a considered thought, as moved as something not felt in a long while, as attentive as an intimate dialogue between people who love each other. The album is made up of many snapshots between neo-folk and slowcore that bring Nelson's style close to that of David Wingo, composer of several soundtracks for David Gordon Green's films. The musician's guitar style is also close to Ben Chasny/Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler, redrawing with clean electric guitar, rather than acoustic or parlour guitar, the geometries of a modern American songwriting that needs no words. Between the pursuit of an ecstatic stillness (“Swimming In A Western Hotel”, “The North Line”) and a poignant lyricism (“Outskirts, Dreamlit”), echoes of ambient textures creep in (“Corneil”, “Wooster, Ohio”) and sounds of the world (“Baitshop”), cracks (“Memorizing, Memorizing”) or traces of an epic narrative (“Just A Story”) that leave behind the feeling of a deja-vu (“Harmony Conversation”).

With even greater rarefaction, both musical and poetic, Fly The Ocean On Silver Plane (2026) builds a concept around the theme of travel as a metaphor for inevitable change. The ten new tracks explore the shape of grief and farewell, but also the mystery of life returning, in the nostalgia of memory and the wonder of new horizons. Mark Nelson's guitar marks out airy arpeggios, stretched into endless reverb, laid over gentle percussive rhythms, electronic beds, synthesizers and samples that blend analog and digital with elegance and ease; the slide guitar and the voices lost in the sonic haze amplify an overall feeling of sad fascination.

Contributions by Matteo Meda (“Cloud Room, Glass Room”), Michele Saran (Anjou), Maria Teresa Soldani (“The Patient Fader”), Luca Viti (“Fly The Ocean on Silver Plane”)

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