Quiet City

Vinyl LP pressing. 2004 album from this solo project by Labradford's Mark Nelson (AKA Pan American). The first two albums under this moniker were organic, strange and beautiful outings with standard instrumentations and various keyboards added for effect. His last got jiggy with a barrage of computer generated effects and sounds almost exclusively. On Quiet City, Nelson brings back the layered electronics, shimmering muffled beats, and striated time and space stretches, and juxtaposes them against upright bass, drums, trumpet, and flugelhorn. As he has done on the early Labradford records, Nelson even sings, making poetic song-like structures of his compositions. The result is a deeply nocturnal, hushed recording that moves in several directions at once. The textures come in waves rather than layers, but they lap at the unconscious rather than in your backbone. They don't swirl so much as undulate, and the various pieces become one dark rainbow body of restrained, humid, sonic inquiry that goes nowhere and everywhere at once.