Hello, from Pampa

The beauty of a flatland isn’t in the immediate surroundings- it lies not in the plain itself, but in the unique synoptic perspective of being totally encompassed in horizon. Moon Baillie gets it- he has traveled far and takes it all in. “I’m only an uncanny American,” he says, between sips of coffee. That sense of familiar, but not quite- it’s bristling in his music. After settling in Seattle, his band Pampa began to write music between the horizons. English, Spanish, time signatures? Nothing is required because the present isn’t the point- it’s where they’ve been and where they’re going that matters. The confines of genre and place hinder the story that’s being told. Low-fi Americana latin psychedelic folk indie rock pop. Whatever. “It’s more about an exploration- who am I? Where do I belong?” Those horizons give Baillie and his bandmates freedom to move around. “You don’t see the horizon in Seattle, the music gives me perspective,” says Baillie who named his band Pampa after the grasslands of his home country Argentina. Their new eponymous record serves as a re-orientation in disorienting times. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen but that doesn’t stop us from playing with joy” says Baillie, thumbing through a tattered copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Exuberance is teeming on songs like “A BEAUTIFUL MESS” and “AMARILLO PANDEMONIO.”  Joy as defiance, the search as orientation, the future as the now- lucid contradictions to a stranger in a strange land. Pampa is on the threshold of something. The threshold is the point. 

-Calder Thorne, editor of Oblique Harmonies

all photos by John Totten

#pampaband