Guest Review: Mark Lesseraux Reviews Kyle Bobby Dunn’s A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn

Kyle Bobby Dunn - A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn

Kyle Bobby Dunn is a 24 year old Canadian born minimalist, ambient-classical composer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past ten years (since he was 14 or 15 it seems) he has been presenting his compositions in live settings, including exclusive outdoor and site specific environments, throughout North America. Having reviewed his catalog, it is this writer’s opinion that young Mr. Dunn is as fine a composer as anyone working in the minimalist-instrumental genre today.

His latest release A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn is a sprawling, near masterpiece of a collection which he recorded, arranged and “processed” between 2005-2009. The double CD features a little over an hour and a half’s worth of primarily drone-based, impressionistic soundscapes. What i find most striking about the record is how it simultaneously immerses the listener in both seemingly unknown and yet somehow familiar, even nostalgic landscapes. Dunn draws from a fairly wide palette of influences. The austere, tempered tonal shifts featured in many of his compositions subtly echo the work of minimalist forerunners like Morton Feldman and LaMonte Young. At the same time Dunn occasionally intersperses quaint, almost chamberal touches which evoke more traditionally classical sources. For the most part though A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn is a forward looking affair which utilizes modern (though never ostentatiously so) acoustic and electronic elements. It is precisely this rich, deft mix of traditional and innovative components which elevates A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn to at times transcendental heights.

Tracks like “The Tributary (For Voices Lost)” and “There Is No End To Your Beauty” on Disc One, feature undulating synthesizer swaths which ebb and flow in slow nocturnal drifts, evoking ominously vast, yet deeply peaceful spatial expanses. On the second half of the double CD, more concise offerings like “Last Minute Jest” and “Sets Of Four (Its Meaning Is Deeper Than Its Title Implies)” utilize repeating piano figures set in mid to large size acoustic spaces. The album’s haunting closing number “The Nightjar” situates what appear to be echo-laden guitar swells against a backdrop of progressively burgeoning patches of feedback. This interplay develops into a sort of pregnant super-slow-motion teetering, which finally dissipates, giving way to the interjection of a tape recorded argument between two young men. The argument ends with a loop of one of the young men inquisitively repeating: “Just looking at yourself?”, “Just looking at yourself?”, “Just looking at yourself?”. Which is ultimately the whole point of KBD’s compositions: to show us previously unseen aspects not of foreign, but rather of our own inner, under-explored realms.

Low Point