Fly the ocean on this silver plane of an album. It’s a smooth flight full of gentle transitions, giving a contemplative view of the larger landscape of our lives.
Astral realms of buttery, finger picked, electric softness
There is nothing to get cranky about when the tinkling electronics and gentle guitar shimmer of Pan•American begin their ascent into cloud lined realms. Mark Nelson has been on a prolific streak, having made two albums with Kramer in 2024 and 2025, another album with Michael Grigoni in 2025. His last solo extended solo outing was the Alpalhão EP in 2022 and now he returns with a full-length record of his own.
For this record he takes the imagery of the airplane into astral realms of buttery, finger picked, electric softness. Gentle notes ride on the buoyance of air, and resonate with impressionistic stratocumulus puffs of breezy synth pads and the slow warmth of languid syncopation.
As the album unfolds it goes from being guitar forward with electronics, to electronica forward with less and less guitar at its apogee, and then moves back in the other direction again. It seems that the higher the plane ascends into the sky realms, the less tethered the music is to the traditional instrumentation and the more fully it embraces the electronic. Then it comes back to being more guitar forward, the plane descending back down to the runway. The tones conjured out of these high-strung strings relieve tension through emotive ambient fretwork.
Perhaps the gradual transition represents the way the soul sheds the body as it transitions into death. It wouldn’t be surprising, because that is one of the themes on this Pan•American outing.
Of my varied interests, dreams and their interpretation have been a continuous area of fascination. Dreams of airports and airplanes have often presaged the death of a loved one, or been places where the dead come back to commune with the living. Airplanes and airports are liminal zones. As Nelson writes in his notes on the album, “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.”
The afterlife theme ::
The afterlife theme is reflected in the song titles such as, “Death Cleaning,” “Entrance to Afterlife,” “Heaven’s Waiting Room,” “Taxi to the Terminal Gate,” and “Golden Gate, Silver City.”
Nelson uses two songs to create what he calls “the spine of this music.” One is “You Belong to Me” by Jo Stafford and the other is Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land.” Using material from these he is able to further embellish his sound paintings with notions of loneliness from the
one left behind from the Stafford song, with the hopeful Americana of the freedom to move and travel that Berry’s tune about going to California in the time of segregation. Here we hear another aspect of the United States as we did on his album New World, Lonely Ride with Grigoni, but hear from the comfort of a Silver Plane traveling at cruising altitudes. The recurrence of these themes is probably to be expected as there was overlap in his recording of this while making the string of other albums mentioned above.
This album sounds very personal and reflective. The cover shows a photo of his mother that he did not know or see until after her passing. “With the headscarf and that excited, nervous expression, she looks about to embark on a journey. Ready, finally, to cross the tarmac and board the Silver Plane.”
Fly the ocean on this silver plane of an album. It’s a smooth flight full of gentle transitions, giving a contemplative view of the larger landscape of our lives.
Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane is available on Kranky. [Bandcamp]
