Pan•American - Biography
Pan American—or just Pan Am—is the alter ego of Mark Nelson, the one-time vocalist/guitarist to the Richmond, Virginia-based post-rock drone duo, Labradford. Seeking a more beat-driven avenue that wasn’t definitively heading towards ambient stasis, Nelson started up the jazz-and-dub fused Pan American in 1997 as a means of bringing drums and pop sounds to electronic experimentations. Over time his sound has evolved and become more minimalist, sublty textured and ultimately digressive. Through five proper albums, Nelson’s musical panoply ranges between jazz, trip-hop, bassanova and, later, computer manipulations tailored towards interior space; the one consistency throughout Nelson’s catalogue is an extraction of each genre’s atmospheric qualities and reassembly as insinuation.
Chosing the name Pan American in part because he dreamed of flying on the leading transatlantic airline of his childhood (Pan Am) and in part because his favorite song was ZZ Top’s “Pan American Highway Blues,” Nelson also thought the name conveyed a sense of vehicular movement of his project. Only, he envisioned the “trip” as a vertical movement rather than a horizontal sweeping plain. After relocating to Chicago, his first full-length album as Pan American—Pan American (1998 Kranky)—featured seamlessly layered sounds, dub pulsing and Carter equipment samples, which vacillated between meditative and chilly. Two years later, Kranky put out his second foray—360 Business/360 Bypass (2000)—which shared sonic similarities with the first. It was recorded with Casey Rice (of Calliope), and featured vocal cameos from Mimi and Al Sparhawk (of Low), as well as the trumpeting of Chicago-based jazz icon, Rob Mazurek.
In 2001, Pan American the first in a series of split CDs, entitled Personal Settings: Preset 1 (Quartermass). Along with Komet (Frank Bretschneider) and the Irishman, Fisherofgold (Joe Kingman), the album contained two of Nelson’s ambient dub tracks to kick things off. He followed this up with his third long player, The River Made No Sound (2002, Kranky), which was more stripped down and textured via computers than his previous efforts, particularly on the eight-minute “For a Running Dog” and the inward-facing “Right of Return,” which swells from hypnotic to epiphany.
Pan American’s fourth album, Quiet City (2004 Kranky) saw a return of Nelson’s subtle production with layered electronics and instrumental touches (everything from fugelhorn to trumpet to upright bass). As the title implied, various sounds distinguish themselves out of the woodwork, and Nelson sings over the atmospherics in equal non-assumption. A gauzy meditation on fatherhood entitled For Waiting, For Chasing was Pan American’s next album, released on Mosz Records in 2006, and was closer to Labradford’s statis than his project’s earlier material.
In 2008, Kranky put out Pan American’s fifth album, White Bird Release, a nine-track effort with contributions from composer Steven Hess. The track titles derived from a letter written by rocket scientist Dr. Robert Goddard: “The can be no thought of finishing for ‘aiming at the stars’ both literally and figuratively is a problem to occupy generations so that no matter how much progress one makes there is always the thrill of just beginning. Dr. Robert Goddard, in a letter to H.G. Wells, 1932.” Comparisons were drawn between Pan American and Eno’s Ambient Four: On Land.