While still better known to many for co-leading the long-dormant and much-missed Labradford, Mark Nelson’s substantive Pan•American venture has quietly and significantly outstripped the onetime Virginian post-rock trio’s body of work, in terms of output and sustainability.
Having taken the project into a series of dual-billed collaborative conceptions after 2022’s The Patience Fader LP – in the shape of two albums on Shimmy Disc with Kramer and one with Mike Grigoni for Kranky – the currently Chicago-based Nelson returns to a more solo set-up with the ruminative Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane.
Although homegrown over a couple of years and predominantly motionless in its composure, this ten-track resettling of the Pan•American modus operandi is consumed by existential contemplations on journeys and travel. The gathered end results are impressively subtle and immersive. Featuring fleeting violin and wordless vocal contributions from near-neighbour Mallory Linnehan (who also operates separately under her Chelsea Bridge alias), Nelson largely entwines electronics with electric and acoustic guitars into mesmerically-meshed mood pieces.
We’re brought inside with a rippling slow-motion symphonic opener (“Silver Plane, Now Boarding”) that majestically sets the scene. Thereafter, across the remainder of the first-side, the sonic landscaping shifts with imperceptible invention — through murmuring somnolence (“Death Cleaning”); softened glitchtronica (“Entrance To The Afterlife”); languorous echoes of Mi Media Naranja-era Labradford (“Desert Under A Dream”); and ambient luna-lit luminosity (“Heaven’s Waiting Room”). The second half is a little looser, but no less amorphously absorbing. Thus, we’re transported through watery pulsations, percolations and orchestrations (“Silver Tramway (In Snow)”); balmy subtle nods to Brian Eno’s Apollo (“Honeymoon-Scott”); blends of inscrutable reverberations and found sounds (“Taxi To The Terminal Gate”); aching treated seams of six-string bending (“A Window In The Strings”); and enveloping near-ecclesiastical undulations and ululations (“Golden Gate, Silver City”).Whilst it takes some patient listening to peel back the hidden layers contained within, the pensive Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane provides plentiful rewards through its serious-minded but soulful roaming through the expansive inner world of Pan•American.
-Adrian-
