Written by: Dave Cantrell
After over five decades of pursuing a dedicated – some might, not unreasonably, say obsessive – curiosity for music in just about all its varied mutliplicities (the only realm that never found but a fleeting footing was classical which was the result of only having so much capacity/energy while understanding that it’s not a pursuit one wishes to give short shrift), there’s an almost too-sublime pleasure in finding oneself immersed once again inside an utterly fresh wave of inspired composition – and the musicianship required to make it sound effortless – that is so clearly guided by a (rare; very rare) level of developed intuition. The last time it reached the level of such that I’m speaking of here was, as both calendar and coincidence would have it, almost exactly a year ago when this same duo of Kramer and Mark K. Nelson AKA Pan American appeared on these pages with a track off their extraordinary Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road, a ‘debut’ LP that, umm, trafficked in grooves so sharply languid as to reset the parameters of what was possible inside the term ‘ambient.’ As then, this new track before us today is alive with the possibilities of the form, both video and audio drawing one in on the cusp of an alluring, quietly electric fog that first surrounds then carries any listener willing to go there forward into a level of offhand reflection that defies easy categorization. Thing is, you see, that this writer, aside from dalliances into Eno’s “Music For..” albums that led to your Jon Hassels and Harold Budds and (rather ‘of course’) Carla Bley’s amazing Escalator Over the Hill as well as, later, the occasional excursions of shoegaze artists into the painterly sublime that, say, Mazzy Star sometimes edged into, it has taken a re-introduction to the form that aforementioned half-century later to better understand – and absorb – the power of the nuance involved. Here, with Pan American/Kramer’s newest outing, there’s this drifting immediacy that carries one with you might call an allusively lingering intensity into regions of reflection and lucid possibility that, in our experience here at SEM, are not destinations commonly expected once the needle hits the groove. To the extent that pieces such as this are meant to transport one, however almost inconspicuously, to experiential depths that you’d likely not find invitations to from other musicians in other realms, well that right there makes them, seemingly unobtrusive as they are, damn near revelatory. And perhaps right there is the proverbial rub: while a track like “Under the Mariana Trench” (from forthcoming full-length Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea released June 27th on Shimmy-Disc) can seem to arrive upon your consciousness like a passing thought, the fact is that, as if often the case with many so-called ‘passing thoughts,’ whatever ‘reverberations’ that accompany their arrival often hold within them, on some level, a revelation. And, quietly piercing as it is, that’s exactly the effect a piece like this can – and this case most certainly does – have. So go on then, click and be carried forth. There’s so much to hear.
