Frontera [LP]

Fly Pan Am have composed some of their most direct, visceral and immediately satisfying music for the acclaimed modern dance piece FRONTERA by Montréal-based troupe Animals Of Distinction. Juxtaposing stern foreboding electronics and minimalist motorik avant-rock, the Frontera studio album superbly captures the bristling, sculpted, intensely evocative instrumental pieces that Fly Pan Am developed in close conception and collaboration with the dancers. The Frontera recordings track faithfully to the narrative of the original work, where eight movements (featuring a company of 10 dancers) flow from controlled chaos and tensely choreographed kinetics to slow, wrenchingly austere set pieces. This also music stands powerfully and exceptionally well on its own, resonating with the themes of the devastating dance piece. Oscillating between tension and release, evoking anxious interzones and claustrophobic spaces, borders and surveillance, resistance and separation, solidarity and cooperation, bodies blocked and restrained, monitored and pursued, hiding and escaping, yearning and overcoming – Frontera conveys an overarching landscape of forbidding and foreclosure, of determined and desperate movement, and the unfathomable multiplicities of trauma and resilience that occur under dehumanising international apparatuses of inadmissibility and control. Deluxe 180gram vinyl includes artworked inner and 6-panel fold-out insert featuring photographic stills from the original dance production.