Time can be interpreted in a variety of forms, the most dominating of which see it as a commodity, as the fourth dimension, and as linearity or history. The visual arts have struggled endlessly to turn these notions into an ecology, a self-sustaining system of connections revealed to us and therefore enacted upon us. It’s a bit funny, then, that there’s a relatively new kind of music that achieves exactly that in several levels of our cognition: drone.

Trailblazing along the recent generation of drone artists led by Stars of the Lid and Celer, Kyle Bobby Dunn here shows what a good set of traditional instruments can still do for the predominantly electronic mediums of the genre. This is not to say that the string section is entirely recognizable, but that after the paradigm shift to electronics during the seventies and the implied disdain for regular instrumentation, this new generation is reevaluating both its uses and meanings for the better. Merging the ‘best of both worlds’, the sounds these bands achieve are unlike anything produced before. In this sense, there’s been an almost logical evolution to the sound of drone, and that’s why Dunn, with a lightness of hand, stresses the importance of him being “a 21st century composer.”
 
Why not just ‘composer’? Why not ‘artist’? There’s a legacy to be found; Dunn constructs his identity as a result of time, a lineage going back to La Monte Young as much as Morton Feldman. Assuming his position in a certain history, he’s already magnified his (indeed considerable) achievements in a vision that is constantly looking backwards. This Guide is two one-hour-long albums and is already a kind of anthology that compiles some of his work from the last six years of activity (with pieces dated from 2005 to 2009). This is a rather bold move for someone who is just twenty four years old; it instantly drives this listener into thinking there might be a pint of irony (after all, it’s called A Young Person’s Guide; if Dunn is anything but old, who is his audience?), or maybe just a good sense of play.

In any case, this is the 21st century composer: a young person moving through different art scenes and scenarios, forever self-conscious, reverent of the past in a manner that is on the limits of seizure (to the point of already willingly relegating himself to it through a compilation), and standing firmly within the awesome sight of contemporary culture. Its fragmentation is a spring of inspiration: hours in Twitter-time are divided by millions of units, a tremendous force of ‘updating’ that makes time seemingly move no longer within human comprehension, mixing up our everyday lives with Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar in a perpetual cascade of chatter and noisy lost thoughts. People ‘spend time’ for these matters; their hyper-connectivity destroys any lingering trace of Fordian leisure and keeps them working on and on day after day… ultimately droning out their possibilities of doing.
 
As a genre, drone is the perfect answer to all this.  Unlike other 21st century composers working within other spaces around the same themes (like Nico Muhly’s great Mothertongue), Dunn perhaps found in it the very attractive potential to shift one’s perception of time. It’s not surprising that instrumentation still matters little, even though it fundamentally changes the type of sound being generated. It’s the pure sound that matters. To better explore these fully-fledged maps of instants, they’re left practically on their own, with a few interventions here and there, a few changes that build up harmonies, feeling like inner sanctums that extend over seventeen, fourteen, eleven minutes of truly slowing down to live. A moment, like the one depicted on the cover, prolonged immensely. This immensity is conformed by high-pitched malleable walls of sound, at times contrasted with low tones in a way that delicately generates multi-dimensional harmonies that are hard for the ear to pin down, immersing the listener in a tangible place.

Since it's all electronic, with the instruments practically processed entirely into tone-producing machines, the music feels like a vivid outgrowth of non-acoustic ambiance colored in sepia.  A dark tone maintains itself 'pure' for a time and suddenly shifts into reverb mode, eventually creating low, intermittent frequencies that help color and shade the lighter, brighter sounds.  These sometimes glide against one another, glitching and overriding. The place's space is created, with the low tones functioning as gravity axis or the earth and the high tones as swift, agile winds crossing each other and dancing their way into asymmetrical currents in displaced time.
 
It is strangely, paradoxically fitting, then, that this ‘retrospective’ of Dunn’s work (an already distant past) fits so well within the frame of sped-up time, like an abstract painting lost within the wall containing it. The abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko sought to develop a ‘fourth dimension’ via a painting’s bidimensionality.  His fourth dimension wasn’t time; it was a state in which the mind was freed from its spatial constraints and thrown into the cathartic colorful void of illumination and consequent liberation. Drone seeks to operate within this other existence, freeing the ears of their attachment to linear language (melody, choruses, enclosed structures) and letting them roam with no end apparent for at least while the album lasts. Time is no longer spent, but lived through and re-appropriated.  No longer is it a perceptual element of reality, but a part of our creativity.  It is no longer history, but true present-tense. Dunn, taking a leap apart from Stars of the Lid and so on, reveals all this with small gestures found across the whole album, from track names to liner notes to the very title of the entire work.
 
In the end, this is what makes this double-disc really interesting, and what fully drove me into this review’s interpretation – the idea of the 21st century composer as channeled through Dunn’s work in the territory of drone. The music itself becomes more rewarding when put through this context, and, for fans of any of the artists mentioned above, Dunn’s work will certainly not disappoint. Beware, though: the listener  might not come out with his sense of time unscathed.

-David Murrieta