Quiet City

Mark Nelson, who is Pan American, cannot find a way to leave well-enough alone — thank goodness. The first two albums under this moniker were organic, strange and beautiful outings with standard instrumentations and various keyboards added for effect. His last, The River Made No Sound 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 fugelhorn. 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. Brilliant. [Quiet City was also released in a special edition that included a DVD of a "video essay" by Chicago visual artist Annie Feldmeier.]