Pan American’s Mark Nelson has become one of the most distinctive guitarists in ambient music by sidestepping the associations that the instrument tends to drag along with it like so many stray tumbleweeds. The latter-day cowboy ambient wave undoubtedly bears a trace of his DNA, yet Nelson has never given into the temptation to bend his strings in the fashion of classic movie scores; his notes are stars in a constellation, each one glinting in its own well-defined space. He’s one of the genre’s most distinctive producers, creating a world of sighs and clicks and mechanical malfunctions on low-key classics like Quiet City and his swan song with Labradford, Fixed::Context. For his last two albums, he’s chosen to swim in the inky black of Mark Kramer’s productions.
Producer of Galaxie 500’s oeuvre and Low’s first two albums, Kramer knows a thing or two about slow and spaced-out guitar music. Working with him is an indie kid’s dream. Yet their two collabs thus far—last year’s Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Reading Road and the new Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea—drift a little close to what Pitchfork’s Brian Howe called Ambient Preservation Society territory, a sound that hasn’t changed much since Eno first heard those harps. Even their ostentatiously witty titles (“The Clouds Over the Rain in Spain,” “John the Baptist was a Creature of Habit”) seem like a gag at the expense of how little is going on here. Stars of the Lid liked to pull the same joke, but that duo’s nothing was a special kind of nothing, while this is music these two old pros could probably keep knocking out for the rest of their lives.
Though the packaging suggests we’re supposed to think of some sort of Saint-Saëns aquatic paradise, the most pervasive image the music evokes is of its making. These are two guys so steeped in their art that their music feels like a conversation. This might be the ambient version of Chester & Lester, the post-retirement album where Chet Atkins and Les Paul chatted on-mic about their colorful lives as dirty old men while smoking their guitars to cinders: Replace fretboard virtuosity with a perfect, learned, honed command of tone and texture, and replace the midcentury icons’ jocular orneriness with the late-afternoon doldrums in which two old friends might find themselves jamming.
Approach Edifice as a physical token of a friendship, and it’s rewarding and kind of heartening, but when it comes to actually taking the listener somewhere, Edifice falls short, often falling into patterns of what ambient music is supposed to sound like rather than poking at what it can sound like. “John the Baptist” flows flawlessly from a dulcet beginning to a roar of noise at the end, but getting excited about a drone gradually building and getting more distorted is like getting excited about a song having a fade-out. “The Double Life of a Seahorse” slathers piano in so much reverb even Harold Budd might’ve found it treacly.
It gets more interesting in the back half, when the two start to melt together a little more —blending into streaks of feedback on “If a River Runs Through It,” finding creepy overtones on “Clouds Over the Rain in Spain.” What most stand out are the individual sounds the two produce, like the avian screech of organ on opener “In The Time It Takes to Drown.” They’re in a special kind of zone here, and any two musicians should be proud to step away from these takes and marvel at what they’ve made, but like a lot of jams, they sound less exciting to listen to than they may have been to make.
In a recent interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby, Kramer expressed a lack of interest in abrasive or chaotic music, preferring to make beautiful things: “There’s little else we can do other than remind the listener that beauty still exists,” he said. If you’re good with that, you might find Edifice satisfying enough. Just don’t expect many moments of revelation.
