Kyle Bobby Dunn :: Pour Les Octaves (Peasant Magik)

The whole tape (yes, a C30 cassette!) has the same effect as watching a perfume commercial on mute: a beautiful, alluring, and determined attempt, limited only by the medium of expression, to convey something intangible.

Soon after the review was published, Kyle Bobby Dunn called me out on my comparison of his last work, Rural Route No. 2, to Stars of the Lid. It wasn’t necessarily a bad comparison, as he (fortunately) doesn’t mind Stars of the Lid, but it was reductive nonetheless. By assigning the term “Ambient” to his work and that of his contemporaries, I had set up expectations for prospective listeners and began to form judgment on their part, almost like the ghetto any album gets shunted into when it’s labeled “world music.”

This got me thinking: ghetto or not, ambient (in most cases, tantamount to “lack of percussion”) is certainly a much richer genre than the term lets on. It’s an odd consequence of one word being used to describe such a broad range of music, something that could encompass, say, The American Dollar and Thomas Köner under the same tag. Critics and musicians alike lack a rich and nuanced vocabulary that can be used to describe ambient music, which is probably why unfortunate Stars of the Lid comparisons are made in the first place. Sure, parts of Kyle Bobby Dunn’s work sounds like parts of the work of better known musicians, but there is something missing in that comparison, perhaps an appropriate emotional context, that differentiates his work from that of others.

Perhaps the only good thing, though, to arise from this nebulous and unhelpful definition is the simplifications of expectations for ambient music. Length limitations are only set by the chosen physical format. Composers have virtual carte blanche on instrument choice. Even good songwriting need not be present. The only requirement, and ostensibly the only factor in a piece of work’s critical reception, is that the final product is “good.” Of course, “good” can mean a lot of things, but it’s a difficult thing to describe, less of a strict set of criteria than it is a gut feeling you develop given enough experience with the genre. You know it when you hear it.

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I could sit here and expatiate on why Pour Les Octaves is good, but at best, words could only approximate the solemn beauty in these two pieces. A literal description will have to do: “PSR Music for Jennifer Schull” floats by, alternating soft, early-morning washes of digitized orchestra swells slowly and peacefully. You can hear a horn or two in there, maybe – but any other sounds are dissolved in the ocean of calm. “Remnants,” the flip side, primarily uses an organ sound. The structure is similar, though – the meek drones fade in and out of consciousness, endlessly resolving in reassuring epilogues. Before you know it, 30 minutes is over.

The whole tape (yes, a C30 cassette!) has the same effect as watching a perfume commercial on mute: a beautiful, alluring, and determined attempt, limited only by the medium of expression, to convey something intangible. In the perfume commercial’s case, it’s an aroma, but in Dunn’s, it’s something less concrete. Is it a transient sense of peace, or is it something deeper, the aforementioned context that he believes makes his music so different from that of Stars of the Lid?

Either way, this is good. What else can I say?

Pour Les Octaves is out now on Peasant Magik. [Purchase]

Peasant Magik

Kyle Bobby Dunn