Kyle Bobby Dunn — A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn

The title of this double-disc set is of course a nod to Benjamin Britten’s  landmark work, but has about as much in common with that staple of middle-school music classes as your average RZA album does. I’m not sure I classify as “young” anymore (I hit 40 next year), but this still served as my guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, a New York-based composer of ethereal, slow-moving but ever-changing and ultimately lovely music.

The first mistake you might make with Dunn’s work is to assume it’s all been digitally generated. According to the notes for the album on the Low Point Records website: “Utilising an instrumental palette of guitar, strings and brass … the sounds of these sessions were recorded as Dunn dictated and then reworked via computer processing into spine-tingling soundscapes.” Prick up your ears and you’ll hear the “real” instruments stepping forward every so often: e.g., “Sets of Four”, which features an unadorned piano recorded in a bath of tape and amp hiss, or “Last Minute Jest” which uses a heavily slap-echoed piano to create deep melancholy and loss.

For the most part, though, the selections are long, revolving swaths of sound, which bring to mind everything from Asher’s Miniatures to soundtrack composer Cliff Martinez—especially his work for Steven Soderbergh’s movie Traffic, but in a far more melancholy and detached way. The track titles also add to the long-ago-and-far-away feeling of the whole thing: “Empty Gazing”, “The Tributary (For Voices Lost)”, “There Is No End To Your Beauty”, or “Grab (And Its Lost Legacies)”. The very last selection, “The Nightjar”, includes a tiny snippet of speech near the end—a found recording?—that comes in as a surprise element and adds an unexpected dimension of touching human vulnerability to the track.

My original guess that this was a compilation album was only partly right. The music in Young Person’s Guide was originally assembled for an album named Fervency, released as a download-only item last year. The first four tracks of disc 1 are from that release; the entire second disc is material recorded at the same time, but not released until now. Whatever the progeny of this music, I’m hoping to hear more of it before long.