PAN AMERICAN - Cloud Room, Glass Room

If there's one project that has managed, in recent years, to best embody the original and characteristic aesthetic of the Kranky catalogue, it's definitely Pan American. Born as Mark Nelson's solo excursion into ambient territory, the act has, album after album, come to reconcile itself more and more with the exploratory coordinates — even before the sounds themselves — that had made him great with Labradford, while still remaining well anchored to his own atmospheric identity. Pan American as the coda of the Richmond trio's experience, tied to it yet free to move with total autonomy, though increasingly resembling the closing of the same circle.

The fluid, sinuous ambient of the early days has indeed, album after album, come to take on a whole series of ripples, which on this new "Cloud Room, Glass Room" take the shape of brushstrokes of vivid, brilliant tempera, pressed onto a livid, dissolving watercolor.

Starting from the title, devotion to the genre's most traditional forms is respected once again, albeit with a new slant: the glass room, an intimate and delicate environment, sounds almost like a reduction to bare essentials of the airport from which it all began, as well as a counterpoint to the tendency that has led ambient music to become ever more abstract, drifting toward places devoid of physical coordinates until reaching pure phenomena, images and thought. But that cloud hovering in the air also manages to mark a break with the world of Brian Eno, in favor of a swarm of rhythmic whispers and suspended microsounds, ready to merge into those crescendos so reminiscent of the past.

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, if not sonic, trait d'union with Brian Eno — and the drizzle amid glimmers of light in "Project For An Apartment Building" respectively bring the room's sounds into the native land of ambient music and plan an expansion of the starting room. Closing things out, laconically, is the drawn-out, docile crescendo of "Virginia Waveform", whose old-fashioned distortions are framed within yet another livid rhythm.

Nelson furnishes his room taking care of every last detail, smoothing every edge and reaching one of the conceptual peaks of the Pan American saga. On the other hand, "Cloud Room, Glass Room" — which unhesitatingly claims the title of the act's most dynamic record — tends to suffer, perhaps emotionally, from its own formal perfection, which makes it, at times at least, too cold and calculated to repeat the triumph of the masterpiece "Quiet City". Nonetheless, it's a remarkable display of courage, as well as yet another quality achievement for a musician who, since 1998, has yet to suffer a real setback.

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15/07/2013