A greater aesthetic distance is hardly imaginable than that between Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane and its accompanying promo photo. The latter is a selfie of Mark Nelson: bad lighting, blank expression, a background that is either meaningless or simply ugly – he could just as easily be a newly divorced man in his late fifties on Facebook. For the cover of what is now the thirteenth Pan-American album, Nelson thankfully opted instead for a photograph of his mother as a young woman. It has class and elegance – and therefore suits these subtle, delicate and nuanced sounds far better.
Where Nelson, with his band Labradford, was still helping to found post-rock in the early 1990s – admittedly a drone/ambient variant of it – the new tracks have nothing to do with “rock” and all the more to do with “post”: Ableton-informed post-folk, or simply experimental electronica of the warm, dreamlike, yielding kind. The finely chiselled, artfully layered pieces are concerned, in the broadest sense, with being in transit. Titles such as »Entrance to Afterlife« and »Heaven’s Waiting Room« also point towards metaphysical states of passage, since Nelson is processing the deaths of his parents here as well. All the more fitting, then, is the image of his mother, looking out from the cover so vividly and curiously.
