‘It’s about this place in North Montreal where I’d go to escape […] It’s incredibly beautiful, but it also filled me with hopelessness and a sense of unease. A lot of the tracks might do that to the listener,’…
Kyle Bobby Dunn dials in From Here to Eternity, an (even more) extended (4LP/3CD) set of doleful elegies and intense drone-hymns. A half-decade hiatus–from …the Infinite Sadness (Students of Decay, 2014), after Low Point high points, A Young Person’s Guide to… (2010) and Bring Me the Head of… (2012), with Ways of Meaning (Desire Path, 2011) between—may suggest a difficult gestation, but there’s no trace of a blockage here. Au contraire, his penchant for the plangent plumbs previously unsounded depths—of a density and portent hitherto unvoiced by this somewhat reluctant leading light in a millennial wave of ambient drone.
Evidently wanting to go further than …the Infinite Sadness, he co-opted a handful of drone homies, including Benoît Pioulard, Simon Scott, Loscil, Wayne Robert Thomas, Mark Nelson and Robert Donne, to outdo what was Dunn—to document no less than ‘the eternal conflict with all human emotions and life circumstances.’ The opening “Preludium Aeterna” sets the tone with a sequence of gradualist arcs of timbres shivering in mesmeric motion. Moods and sounds resound, from angelic chorale to soundtrack epic, with a sense of boundaries and mortality. Chronostasis and ecstasis take turns to tend to tones, languorously looping them through deceptively evacuated zones, rendering them replete with detail. Finding a (sad-)happy medium between small-scale elegiacs and more plumped-up micro-orchestral maneuvers, space for bright breakthrough within doleful dalliance. It’s the Dunn thing.
‘It’s about this place in North Montreal where I’d go to escape […] It’s incredibly beautiful, but it also filled me with hopelessness and a sense of unease. A lot of the tracks might do that to the listener,’ he says (self-titled) in re: “Boul. Gouin,” one of a set exploring ‘the general feeling of malaise many people are experiencing right now,’ mordantly on later pieces like the blackened “Dead Calm (Southcentre Suite).” His palette, with its signature stretched sustains and textural micro-variations, saturated like an instrumentalist analog to BoC‘s synth-y wow’n’flutter warble, but with a change of voice, center stage and in the margins; as in the archness of ‘reflecting heavily on the gorgeous feet of a certain French woman and binging on strong beers and cheese’ (here) turning to the earnest ‘Truly a difficult album of unending loss, confusion, pain, identity, disease and even death.’ And more…
‘It’s about what I see my life being, maybe what I see all of us being. I feel like I see more evil now than ever, and find it all so terrifying. So I’ve been searching for a sense of peace or calm, but am terrified of that as well.’
If the swollen trajectory From Here to Eternity threatens with pacific petrification, there’s a whole Weltschmerz in microcosm in the intense finale of “Eternity, the Stars & You.” It sees the numbness of Infinite Sadness cede to the peace and terror of Eternity. And the day of Dunn’s drollery done.
From Here to Eternity is out now [digital] and in May [vinyl] on Past Inside the Present, which offers an array of possible formats—and some impossible (sold out).
