Fly Pan Am
Sédatif en fréquences et sillons EP
CST011 EP • CD • DL
Release date: 23 October 2000
Duration: 29:35
The group ghost-mixes cuts from their debut album according to a dream logic that folds found sounds, motorik freeway chugging and static hiss into a single extended movement." – The Wire
"Fly Pan Am takes us on a mesmerizing ride of instrumental bliss, which keeps us interested right up till the end… If my dreams were set to music, this album would definitely be playing." – Offbeat
"[The opening track is] an eerily beautiful, ghoulishly demented and meticulously assembled merger of horror and sound." – Splendid
This 3-song EP of fractured, tape-infested experiments is an intransigent slab of self-referential auto-criticism. The band was sticking to its agenda of acutely self-conscious musical manipulations, re-working its own materials and assumptions to yield new compositions of uncompromising formalism. Side A is a medley of sorts, consisting of phrases and fragments reconfigured and replayed from their self-titled debut (Fly Pan Am). Various melodies are reassembled and played off of one another, creating an extended live remix with blissful passages of layered guitars, drones, sampled backing vocal lines, and the requisite incidental noise break in the middle of the piece. The result is something like a ‘Stars On 45’-style musical encapsulation of the entire debut record. Side B contains a new piece of somnambulist clockwork repetition, with the band laying down a strict, static groove while various tape manipulations penetrate the mix to create polyrhythms, dissonances and additional textures. This is prime anti-funk, invoking early Talking Heads along with all things krautrock, and driving home the EP’s subtitled intent: “stereo-stupefiant”.
PACKAGING NOTES
CD comes in a custom paperboard mini-gatefold jacket with a printed CD dust sleeve.
CREDITS
Jonathan Parant: guitar, tapes
Felix Morel: drums, tapes
Roger Tellier-Craig: guitar, tapes
J.S. Truchy: bass, tapes
FEATURED GUESTS
Norsola Johnson: voice on Track 1
Recorded and mixed at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal by Thierry, Efrim and Fly Pan Am, winter-spring 2000.
Additional recording on Track 1 by Aidan Girt.