Pan American & Kramer

Mark Nelson, or the sound sculptor known as Pan American, and Kramer (aka ‘Bonner Kramer’), or the producer known simply as Kramer, have made enough music history to know that there is no need to rush. Their exquisite 2025 album together, Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea, is a steady collection of eight ambient pieces that each find a space of slow motion or relative stillness and simply exist there, like a safety buoy bobbing on relatively calm seas. Kramer was a fixture of New York indie and avant rock for two decades, whether running the legendary studio Noise New York or helming the indispensable label Shimmy-Disc. Alongside tours with the likes of Ween and Butthole Surfers, he produced essential records by Daniel Johnston and Galaxie 500. Nelson, meanwhile, was an early sculptor of American ambient and slowcore music, with his great band Labradford issuing a string of paradigm-setting albums on Kranky.

Nelson was long associated with Richmond, Kramer with New York. With the former now in Chicago and the latter ensconced in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, they rendezvoused for a 2024 debut of floating drones and winding guitar, called Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road. As expected from the title, they sink deeper for Under the Sea, with the horizon-spanning keyboards of Kramer letting Nelson settle beneath the surface on “Blind to the Last of Its Kind.” During “Under the Mariana Trench,” they seem to float upward like air bubbles from that deep, dark place, trying to lift one another to a surface they cannot yet see. Nelson and Kramer are content with finding a strand of beauty and following it until they slip into the next one.