Pan American - A Son - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

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.

C'est ça marks the return of Montréal avant-rock quartet Fly Pan Am, who released an acclaimed series of albums in Constellation's early years, from 1999-2004. The band's unique and heady collision of motorik repetition, shoegaze maximalism, punk skronk, tape- and electronic-based interventions and audio sabotage, garnered them a cult following among fans of audaciously deconstructed post-rock. Fly Pan Am quietly reunited in late 2017 for purely artistic reasons (needless to say), to explore making new music together after more than a decade spent in pursuit of separate sonic adventures. Within weeks, it was clear the band was firing on all cylinders again, brimming with electricity and eager to pick up where they'd left off with their last album N'écoutez pas back in 2004 pushing further into full-spectrum intersections of noise pop, post-punk, power electronics and musique concrète, while continuing to incorporate shrouded, textural vocals as alternately melodic and visceral components. C'est ça is a brilliant return to form for Fly Pan Am - an album of renewed vitality and experimentation where rock structures underpinned by J.S. Truchy's trademark rapid- fire bass and Félix Morel's disciplined, ascetic drumming are submerged beneath waves of processed guitar by Roger Tellier-Craig and Jonathan Parant, with fluorescent noise treatments and sonic vandalisms wrought by all four. InchDistance DealerInch, InchEach EtherInch and InchInterface Your Shattered DreamsInch nod to important influences like MBV and Hüsker Dü, while collapsing into/out of themselves in various ways. InchOne Hit WonderInch, InchBleeding DecayInch and InchDiscreet ChannelingInch vault some of Fly Pan Am's earliest reference points into the present namely, the intrepid proto-Kosmiche of This Heat and Can, and later style-adjacent torchbearers like Boredoms, Flying Saucer Attack and Trans Am. But

The music on this record is a reflection of journeys and travel. The real world kind and the metaphorical ones as well. Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit. Travel and it's impressions, rituals, superstitions-the possibilities and risk-all open up onto the landscape of our biggest questions, fear and wonder. Two songs established the spine of this music. Songs I've always loved, it seems even before I'd heard them. The first one, and the source of the title is 'You Belong to Me' by Jo Stafford. Colonial overtones unmissable to our modern ears aside, it's also a beautiful mid century romance-and an ode to the threat of a shrinking world. The song represents the loneliness and the mystery of being alone and left behind. The singer is not asking their loved one to shut down horizons, merely reminding them to return when the traveling is done. To set aside The Silver Plane of transition, change and the in-between for the intimacy of solid earth. InchThe second song is 'Promised Land' by Chuck Berry. Also about a journey and another one that moves easily between allegory and narrative. The singer is on the move across segregated America trying to get to the promised land of California. The song is both a tall tale that evokes Mark Twain, and an American epic that can keep good company with Herman Melville. When the hero finally makes it to California, his first instinct is to call home and reassure the Old World that he's safely arrived in the new one. InchThe songs on Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane were recorded at home over the last couple years. I played electric guitar, rubber bridge acoustic guitar, Ableton Live and an Electron Digitone synth. My friend Mallory Linnehan