Pan American (solo)

Mark Nelson has been a key conduit and innovator of American ambient music for more than 30 years. In the early ’90s, he cofounded the trio Labradford, whose 1993 Prazision LP was the first release on Kranky, the Chicago label that continues to serve as a tastemaker for slow, soft sounds three decades later. Labradford drifted methodically between ambient hum and doomy rattle, between slowcore moan and post-rock tension, establishing curving byways that many other bands soon followed. Nelson began releasing more insular solo music as Pan American in 1998, before Labradford disbanded and before his subgenres of interest had floated toward their current of wider attention. His string of albums in the past quarter-century are rafts of largely instrumental exploration, documenting a restlessness that belies the pace of his patient music.

Take Pan American’s excellent 2019 album, A Son, where nine tracks all present different ways toward meditative transcendence. Where “Muriel Spark” suggests Neil Young bringing Old Black to a Fennesz session, “Sleepwalk Guitars” staggers down an empty hallway, each lonely note bumping into another wall. Where “Shenandoah” is a tide of heavenly drone, its predecessor is an ecstatic dulcimer exploration, electronics radiating beneath the symphony of bright notes. In 2024, Pan American released “Point Harbor,” three minutes of field recordings, long synthesizer tones, and slide guitar moaning beneath a rainbow built from a choir of tiny notes. It was, Nelson wrote, “part of a continuing effort to expand the harmonic vocabulary of Pan American.” Such efforts keep making his music so vital.