The Patience Fader

The glacial distillation of PanAmerican, also known as Mark Nelson's "romantic minimalism," reaches a unique culmination on his latest collection from Kranky, titled The Patience Fader. This album features a series of solo guitar instrumentals enhanced with lap steel, harmonica, and twilight atmospherics. The strings create a mesmerizing effect, with elegant swells and sparkling notes that evoke a sense of windswept beauty. Brian Eno once likened this guitar style to "Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie." The tracks on this album are not just songs but elegies, gently soothing and swaying in currents of both beauty and sorrow. Nelson describes his music as "lighthouse music," offering a guiding light from a stable perspective to help navigate through life's challenges. Composed during the isolated summer of 2020, these pieces reflect on themes of roots, mourning, and the search for deeper connections within a community. There is a timeless quality to this music, carrying echoes of American landscapes marked by scars and stories, creating a haunting yet reverent atmosphere that resonates with the essence of rust belts and dust bowls against the backdrop of a darkening horizon.