Mark Nelson’s extended excursion into the ambient afterlife began a few years prior to the unofficial 2001 disbandment of Labradford, Richmond, Va.’s celebrated disciples of drone. In the ensuing years, Pan•American has served Labradford’s post-rock brand admirably while staking out subtler sonic territory. For PA’s 14th LP, Nelson spins the dial irrevocably toward himself. He describes the music on Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane (Kranky) as “a reflection of journeys and travel—the real-world kind and the metaphorical ones as well.”
The album was inspired by the emotionally polarized twin milestones of fatherhood and losing his own parents. And then there are the many years of his own “venturing out and returning home.”
“This record was recorded over the past few years at home,” says Nelson. “Some parts are three or four years old; some are brand new. Travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit—travel and its impressions, rituals and superstitions.”
Nelson stayed still long enough to break it all down below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Silver Plane, Now Boarding”
“The voices that open the song are the kids in my neighborhood playing on a summer night. The game is kind of like ‘red light, green light.’ There’s something about counting the hours and then yelling ‘midnight’ that I find really haunting but comforting. Midnight always comes, and eventually the final midnight also comes—that’s a big part of this record’s theme. Getting Chelsea Bridge playing violin here really opens up the song to something very rich and human.”
2) “Death Cleaning”
“This started with a kind of 3/4 rhythm played with some rocks I found at the lake. Our entire family has a bit of a compulsionto bring home rocks, sticks, pieces of rusted metal, etc. Sometimes they end up in the music; usually they’re just on windowsills and bookshelves. The vocals on this were kind of inspired by MJ Guider. She does a kind of chanting thing that I really like, and listening to her freed me up from thinking of vocals in a more traditional way.”
3) “Entrance To Afterlife”
“I’ve spent so much time over the past years working on guitar playing. But I’ve also been working on electronic songs—mostly just trying to learn software. As I started putting this record together, I realized I’d built up a whole little family of tracks over the years. This one started out with me just trying to learn Ableton session view. The big, overdriven sound that fades in is an Omnichord recording I’ve had for years—and it finally found a home.”
4) “Desert Under Bridge”
“A tribute to the 29 Palms Inn just outside Joshua Tree. We were there during an incredible wind-and-sand storm, when it felt like the windows were just going to explode. It was too cold to swim in the pool, but the restaurant was fantastic.”
5) “Heaven’s Waiting Room”
“I have an Ace Tone Rhythm Ace drum machine—the same model J.J. Cale used on ‘Call Me The Breeze.’ I kind of wish I’d tried putting guitar on this—maybe something like Cluster together with J.J. Cale. Heaven indeed.”
6) “Silver Tramway (In Snow)”
“More California desert music. I started this one in Ableton while in Palm Springs. I stumbled on a way of running some rubber bridge guitar parts through a pitch shifter to get that harp-like sound. This is when all the themes of travel and afterlife came together—and, of course, it’ll be all harps played by angels when we reach our final destination. Chelsea Bridge makes this one too with multiple violin tracks.”
7) “Honeyman-Scott”
“James Honeyman-Scott was only 25 when he died. I don’t know why that, of all the rock ’n’ roll early deaths, his is the one that I think about the most. Learning To Crawl by the Pretenders is one of my favorite records ever. He’s not on it, of course. But somehow, I feel like his spirit is.”
8) “Taxi To The Terminal Gate”
“I made this out of some landscape recordings and synth tones in Borderlands Granular, an iPad app developed by my good friend Chris Carlson. I really like how the filter behaves on this track—the digital elements seem to warm up the analog ones, which is unusual. I think it speaks to how musical Borderlands can be, while also being such a strange digital microscope to aim at audio.”
9) “Window In The Strings”
“In the Wayne Shorter documentary, there’s a part where Wayne talks about showing an orchestration to Miles Davis that he’s been working on. Miles looks at the notation and says, ‘Leave me a window in the strings.’ This reverberates in my mind as an expression or metaphor for the afterlife—that perhaps the beauty and hope we build in our lives becomes woven throughout time and space.”
10) “Golden Gate, Silver City”
“Synth arpeggios that again kind of feel like a harp playing in the distance—once again all of it brought to life by Chelsea Bridge, this time on vocals. When she sang that upward swoon part, I knew it was the last song for the record and her voice would be the last sound on it. In a way, it ties to the kids’ voices on the first track, and the record begins to create a loose loop of itself.”
