PAN AMERICAN - Fly The Ocean In Silver Plane

There are no more doubts about the path Mark Nelson wants to pursue; since "Quiet City", each new step feels less like an artistic evolution than a slow change of state. Every release under the now twenty-year-old Pan American project coincides with a further rarefaction, both musical and poetic, compared to the last, and with an ever more intimate, crystalline melancholy that never fails to astonish the listener.

Built around the theme of travel, portrayed as a mirror of inevitable change, the ten new tracks probe the shape of grief and farewell, but also the mystery of life returning, caught between the nostalgia of memory and the wonder of new horizons. The awareness of time passed, and its negation through the impersonal, suspended atmospheres of airports, come together in a paradox as painful as it is weightless, resulting chiefly in a disenchantment with the irreversibility of existence and its directions.

Mark Nelson's guitar traces airy arpeggios, stretched into endless reverb, laid over gentle percussive rhythms, electronic textures, synthesizers and samples that blend analog and digital with elegance and ease; Mallory Linehan's (aka Chelsea Bridge) violin incursions, along with slide guitar and voices lost in the sonic fog, amplify an overall feeling of sorrowful allure.

The opener "Silver Plane, Now Boarding" combines expansive delay and field recording; the orchestration wraps around a delicate theme, shadowed by a sense of waiting. "Death Cleaning" lets a simple, essential line surface, murmured, from a dense layering of harmonies, electronic textures and percussion: you can go now. "Entrance To Afterlife" and the following "Silver Tramway (In Snow)", steeped in urban, nocturnal suggestions, develop a minimal, captivating dub, reminiscent of "360 Business/360 Bypass". "Desert Under The Bridge", by contrast, settles into more intimate, distinctly ambient atmospheres.

The crystal-clear synth echoes over the muted tribal rhythms of "Heaven's Waiting" recall the most carefree moments of Popol Vuh, made for the opening shots of Werner Herzog's conquests of the useless, soaring over primordial natural landscapes.

The gorgeous, heart-wrenching "Honeyman-Scott" is instead a delicate theme of love and farewell, turning suspension into the sweet, terrible shape of melancholy; guitars and electronics brush against each other with extreme lightness amid arpeggios, slide guitar and distant electronic beats, in a sad, dreamlike architecture à la "The Sound Of Someone You Love Who's Going Away And It Doesn't Matter" by Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

The underwater sonorities of "Taxi to the Terminal Gate" float on the field-recorded surf of the sea, opening the way to the journey's end. The solitary reverbs and stretched flanger of "A Window In The Strings" shape nostalgia into a new, dense awareness, which Linehan's voice in "Golden Gate, Silver City" ideally accompanies alongside the closing credits; the return flight, on this silver plane, trapped in its own paradox, is about to land.

A limpid record, crystalline as the air of those cold winter mornings, so pure and so painful to breathe; elegant as the face of Mark Nelson's mother pictured on the cover, ready to set off on a journey, so young, impatient and at the same time frightened by the boundless vastness of existence.

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14/04/2026