Pan•American – Pan•American

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, volume was the go-to signifier for musical rebellion. Louder and faster had been accepted as the only sonic way to express anger and discontent – nuance, intent, and depth be damned. Whether gabba, hardcore punk, speed metal, thrash, rap or electronic dance music, the reflex seemed to be maximalism. In that climate, Mark Nelson’s debut as Pan•American seemed to cut through the noise with silence. Granted, Kranky, which issued the record, had been laser-focused on trimming the fat through releases by Low, Labradford (Nelson co-founded the group), Roy Montgomery, and Stars of the Lid since its birth in 1993, and ambient music was following its own path throughout that same period. Pan•American, though, seemed to split the difference. As precisely arranged as Marie Kondo’s patio, the album’s nine tracks employ subtle electric guitar lines, synths, heavy dub-influenced bass, reverb, and an undercurrent of ambient textures to create a graceful, trip-hop adjacent thing of beauty. – Randall