Kyle Bobby Dunn - Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn
- Written by Greg Salter
Kyle Bobby Dunn has produced an impressive back catalogue of instrumental, loosely ‘ambient’ music over the last few years – Fragments And Compositions Of was his first official release in 2008, following a series of CD-Rs, while 2010’s A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn brought together a range of pieces from a recording career that stretched back to his early teens. Last year’s Ways Of Meaning was a meditative, moving step forward - with the tracks recorded over a shorter space of time in one place, the whole LP felt unified and encompassing as you listened.
Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn is the drone musician’s most ambitious and affecting collection of compositions yet. Spanning two discs and over two hours, it is a carefully-sequenced collection of tracks, ranging from shorter interludes to more expansive pieces that reach beyond ten minutes. Despite its length, this could be the ideal introduction to Dunn’s music for newcomers – drone can be a daunting, often cold genre but Dunn’s compositions are simultaneously intensely personal and moving, and the long run time is ideal for taking in the atmospheres and resonances of this music.
Dunn has a distinct style of composition that makes the music on Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn particularly appealing. He’s particularly adept at bringing out warmer, organic-sounding tones in the electric guitar processing he uses to create these tracks. For example, on ‘The Hungover’, colder, more metallic waves of sound are rounded and reshaped by subtle, patient, warm sounds that soothe and shift the track across its twelve minutes. When asked about the process of composition, Dunn has said, “I find some peace but it also exists in a rather sad, almost quiet hateful element” – this intermingling of contrasting emotions is something you can hear here, in music that is as peaceful as it is unsettling, and as insular as it is outward-looking.
In embracing these contradictions, the music on Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn manages to be profound with no need for words – Dunn has reflected on how crucial music is as a vehicle of communication for him and these compositions, in their subtle shifts and patient, circular melodies, make broad emotional gestures while still being tied to specific memories, for him and for whoever listens. In a year when the more general conversations in independent music have been focused around maximalism and the influence of the internet, Dunn’s music is testament to what can be achieved with minimal instrumentation and sheer scope of vision and reflection. These pieces sound like meditations on memory – its happiness and bitterness, and its almost ungraspable or indescribable significance – and, like memories, they beg to be returned to again and again.