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┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Proudly Presents: │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
pan american - the river made no sound
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date Apr-17-2003
style Ambient
label n/a
cat.no. n/a
source CDDA
type Sampler
quality 192kbps 44,1hz Joint-Stereo
size 75,0 MB
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Releasenotes
Mark Nelson's third release as Pan American, The River Made No Sound
is, aside from its artistic worth, a subtle and charismatic
amalgamation of many current trends in electronic music production.
In the span of the album's 50 minutes Nelson courses through the
influences of microhouse, dub, ambient music and a bevy of glitchy
techniques, while keeping them all in balance, to render a record
that is best taken in one sitting to better experience the elegance
of its arc. But for all its technical rigor, it's a quiet album that
can pass you by if you don't take it on it's own low-key, slowed-down
terms.s
Nelson owes a debt to the originator of what we know as ambient,
Brian Eno, in his atmospherically charged soundworlds. The River is
like a music installation that replicates summer nights in fields and
drizzly twilights alongside the white noise of crowds, traffic, and
radio communications. While it's a fairly well trodden path in music
lately, Pan American sidesteps easy comparison by making these
borrowed ambiences the bone and tissue of his pieces, and not just
the lineaments. There is, in the words of Wire magazine editor Rob
Young, no "self conscious ornamentation" here, as there is in many
current releases using the same sonic materials.
The ambiences are merged with nearly subliminal beats -- the
click-thud of a synthetic bass drum, metronome clicks, and various
glitchy percussion -- and subsonic dub basslines. And Nelson makes a
fine game of hiding them and playing with perspective. The disc
begins in a kind of virtual field, with electronic frogs upsetting
the blanket sounds of the outdoors night. Through the first half of
the record this general ambience holds sway, though it is only
pronounced in the opening track, "Plains". Nelson's patience in
building a record begins to become clear as defined rhythms very
slowly become more powerful in relation to the ambiences. The payoff
begins at "Place Names", where an electric piano takes center stage,
signaling the first of the program's subtle mutations. In the
following "Red Line", the electric gives way to the extraordinary
decay of chords on a grand piano, which give birth to a procession of
fascinating percussion techniques and signal the album's general
barometric shift from dry open spaces to lower-ceilinged rain and
cloud cover.
"Raised Wall", the sixth track, introduces some play in high
frequencies heretofore neglected on the record. They are similar to
the hyper ball-in-a-box sound that Autechre decisively claimed as
their own by sheer endurance on the opener of last year's Confield.
Pan American's motives are not the same, however -- the "ball" is
part of an overall hyper-kinetic environment that includes an
unusually musical use of scraping sounds and another mist of
glitches. It's a short piece that serves as a prelude to the greater
development of these materials in "St. Cloud", which serves as the
centerpiece of the second half of the record's rainy atmospherics.
Nelson manages to evoke quite a panorama of wet streets,
greenish-blue atmosphere, and warm orange-lit windows with his
arsenal of electronic tools. "2-Sided" is a brief exercise in
electronic percussion and panning techniques that winds into "Right
of Return", where the disc ends much as it began, though it seemingly
retains the experience of its development in its final soothing
glitchscapes.
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Playlist
01 Plains 03:36
02 for A Running 08:22
03 Settled 04:38
04 Place Names 06:44
05 Red Line 09:12
06 Raised Wall 03:06
07 St. Cloud 07:09
08 2-Sided 02:19
09 Right of Return 09:29
. .
54:35 min
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Additional info:
This release is made for the friends at XILUS.
Enjoy this release!
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