Pan Am Down - One - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

UK standard disc pressing features two bonus tracks, 'Dirty Little Secret' and 'Unbreakable'. Universal. 2005.

Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson's latest offering as Pan•American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of Inchmoving backwardInch and tracing roots-as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons-the album's nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry InchWhat does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?Inch After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan•American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is.

The glacial distillation of Pan•American aka Mark Nelson's Inchromantic minimalismInch achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as InchDuane Eddy playing Erik Satie.Inch These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of Inchlighthouse music,Inch radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending Incha signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.Inch Composed during the highly isolated summer of 2020, the pieces took shape as meditations on Inchroots and mourning, trying to connect with those deep hidden rivers that lead to a greater communality.Inch There's something ageless, scarred, and American about this music, both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk.