Fly Pan Am - Frontera

A Closer Listen

This is one fast album.  When we write, “After 25 years, Fly Pan Am shows no sign of slowing down,” take it literally. While a hint of the speed can be found at the end of last year’s extended video single “Mirror Cracks Seeking Interiority,” the album is far removed from the band’s earliest recordings and even from 2019’s C’est ça, which followed a 15-year hiatus.

So what sparked such a transition?  For the members of this Montreal band, it was the opportunity to score a dance production by Dana Gingras and the Angels of Distinction, described as a “meditation on borders and surveillance, resistance and separation, solidarity and cooperation.”  The Frontera tour was brought to a halt by COVID-19, but this afforded the band members the opportunity to record a studio rendition.

The album begins with a sonic surge, followed by crunchy field recordings and a persistent drum. The guitars wait in the wings like anxious dancers.  Then that same surge, this time on beat.  The third time, the pace doubles.  “Grid / Wall” plunges the listener into the album and we suspect, in time, to the dance floor ~ a pleasant surprise from a post-rock act.  The electronic shift at 6:04 begs for a 12″ mix.  The piece segues directly into “Parkour,” passing 150 b.p.m.  These dancers must be exhausted.  The “controlled chaos” on stage is meant to imitate bodies packed together in border camps or protest marches: a stark contrast to the “six feet apart” of the pandemic and a reminder of prison infection rates.  Those who know “Interface Your Shattered Dreams” should be prepared for the screamo (not found on earlier works), an expression of pent-up frustration.

Ironically, the single (“Scanner”) is slow and moody, which may have thrown off early listeners.  The dancers needed a break after sixteen minutes of rapid movement.  “Scaling” unfurls from this point with dark energy and a sense of menace.  The electronics are robotic, measured, impervious to petitions and pleas.  After a sullen train engine introduction, the return to “Parkour 2” sets the feet in motion again.  From here to the end of the set, there’s a give and take between beats and textures, as drone elements enter to disorient and unnerve.  The three closing tracks unfold as a triptych, settling on a tempo akin to a heartbeat: the machines retreat to reveal a human heart.  The guitars rise one last time, dissolving into a cascade of drums, then a sudden cut-off.  One thinks of lives snuffed out too soon, and wonders, is anybody listening?  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

From blues to techno via krautrock and black metal, there’s a tension in transportive music with repetitive structures as a base for lines of psychic escape. It’s a conflict that Fly Pan Am shine a magnifying glass on with Frontera as they translate borders, surveillance, and the gross asymmetries of power they represent into sound.

Originally a multimedia collaboration with choreographer Dana Gingras and the Animals of Distinction Dance Company, the Canadian five-piece created music in response to the choreography of light and dancers. The nine tracks on Frontera isolate Fly Pan Am’s part in the project, yet taking the multi- out of multimedia doesn’t dilute the themes seared into the music.

The state’s security apparatus can veer from an inconvenience and a privacy concern to an immovable force brutally dictating your life chances. The stark truth is those of us born in the global north will likely never feel the full cruelty that a border regime embodies. Fly Pan Am’s response is to chart the scale of the pervasive, shape-shifting surveillance machine itself. A band usually marked by deft control of negative space have become startlingly monolithic.

‘Grid/Wall’ is a taught mesh of laser-crafted sound, caustic electronics and barbed guitars lacerating an unrelenting groove. Even on Frontera’s quieter, less rigid movements an ominous presence lurks, from acousmatic dirges to synths which sound more dental than musical.

From titling an album N’ecoutez pas (‘Don’t listen’), to the glitched meta funk of Ceux qui inventent n’ont jamais, Fly Pan Am have always wryly interrogated rock music convention in a way somewhere between high art and pranksterism. Formulaic structures treated as containers to fill with unfamiliar contents, momentum as something to be gently nudged off course. Frontera’s stand-out tracks, ‘Parkour’ and ‘Parkour 2’ see the band push at the limits of the motorik, interrogating the slim line between levitation and enclosure, escapist transcendence and marching song. On ‘Parkour’, the denouement is harrowed screams breaching a kosmiche crescendo, the human tearing at the barriers of the digital panopticon. On ‘Parkour 2’, it’s a choir, hitting a moment of arresting beauty against the machines’ rhythms. Michael Rother compared Neu!’s music to water, but Fly Pan Am burst the river’s banks.

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