To / From

I love albums like this. The ones that I can relate to in more than just one way. To the music, to the story that it comes with, the stories within my own life and being that both of them trigger, the ways I feel I can relate to them, even if only based on similar experiences, memories, images.

There’s this image on the cover of the album. I didn’t read any of the accompanying release notes or interviews with Mark Nelson, at least none that referred to this photography. Fly the ocean on a silver plane. Such a beautiful combination of image and title. A glimpse back into what will probably have been the sixties, a time when air travel was still something extraordinary and exciting, when you still dressed exceptionally well for every flight, no matter where it was going and no matter what class you might have booked. You can see her anticipation, the knowledge of soon doing something she will always remember, and even the realization that there’s a need to not only dress accordingly, but also to carry a demeanor that fits the occasion. My guess would have been that it’s just before first boarding a plane.

It’s even the language, come to think of it. Would we really say “fly the ocean” today? Isn’t it how it was phrased when this photo was taken? A time when planes were still silver, especially the ones that flew the ocean? In a silver plane, not on, as we say today, maybe the way it would have been said by someone that is boarding a plane for the first time in their life. What I suspected, when I saw this, is actually true – it’s a photography of Mark Nelson’s mother, one he found after she had already gone.

My first flight across an ocean was anything but glamorous, but as far as I can remember, it was still a silver plane, back in 1979, on a flight from Hamburg to Detroit, with a stopover on Iceland. It’s what planes still did in those days, along with the movie screens that were rolled down from the ceiling some time after dinner. I remember the planes, a DC-9 on the way over, and a TriStar from Detroit to Atlanta where I would meet the family I’d stay with for a year.

This is the thematic aura of “Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane” – going from one place to another, both relating to places and life. Instead of turning them into some kind of concept album (which would be very un-Pan•American anyway), these themes float, the gracefully swirl around the tracks, touching them here and there, the titles taking them up, sometimes touched by transit, sometimes by transience.

As much as this album is different from “The Patience Fader”, it opens with a track that feels like a bridge, feeling like it’s taking the warmest aspects of that album to gently move into this one. “Fly Across The Ocean In A Silver Plane” is more about love, compassion and marvel, in spite of mortality and loss being part of the emotional landscape. As such, the opener “Silver Plane, Now Boarding” also sets the tone.

“Death Cleaning” on the other hand shows how different this album is from its predecessor. Soft vocals that sound as if just quietly sung along, bubbling, a small beat that sounds like something between strolling and skipping along a summery path – there is much joy to be found. Yet again different, in a different way: “Entrance to After Life”, electronic at heart, with a fast pace and almost jittery synths and a lightness that is optimistic at heart, it feels like passing on to the afterlife is a very inspiring and very much not sad moment.

The first three tracks do a fine job of opening the field for this album, and it keeps getting wider with “A Window In The Strings”, a piece that locates another dimension of this unlikely space between Ambient and Americana, or Post Country, however you want to define it. One of the more pensive moments, in a lovingly floating state.

Just like the entrance to afterlife is anything but sorrowful, “Heavens Waiting Room” with its tiny electronic rhythm and its angelic, embracing synths sounds like a light-filled ceremonial hall full of wondrous expectation with an assembly of people that are full of transitional anticipation, wondering where they go next and what it will be like – the ultimate form of waiting for boarding.

The album’s space keeps growing with every new track. “Silver Tramway In Snow” is playfully electronic at heart, a little bit like ISAN maybe, but with the very non-electronic addition of Mallory Linehan / Chelsea Bridge on violin, and it oscillates back and forth between the edges of its themes, circling back to the subject of mortality when “Honeyman Scott” hints at the early and tragic loss of the Pretenders’ guitarist, with an ethereal piece of Ambient that is as far from mourning as an unbelievably beautiful sunrise, every note a sparkling little dew drop.

It pairs peculiarly well with “Taxi To The Terminal Gate”, another Ambient excursion. Soothing field recordings, muted guitar sounds, like lights reflecting of slightly agitated water when passing by, the sonic experience seeming to reflect thoughts rather than images of the taxi ride itself, other than a few things rushing by, barely noticed during a ride in contemplation.

By the time we get to “Desert Under Bridge” we have gladly lost ourselves in an album that has a gorgeous way of not being about something specific without being the slightest bit unspecific. We listen and we feel, a breeze of Americana running through a track that sounds like missing home, the desert being the away, the bridge being the passage, to “Golden Gate Silver City”, a place like heaven, angelic indeed, with angelic voices and tinkling little stars, as if Nelson had entered Eno’s spacecraft alongside Linehan and left the orbit of the moon to just float on, to a place beyond comprehension, a place that must be Heaven.

There is a so much to marvel at, so much to and from, and then there are all the moments, every one of them precious, getting dressed to fly across the sea in a silver plane, that gracious and expectant glance captured in a photo, found many years later, to grace a beautiful album that lets these moments float in aural space for us to enjoy.

Release for review:
PAN•AMERICAN – FLY THE OCEAN IN A SILVER PLANE – KRANKY – 251

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