To picture the effect of the music on A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, close your eyes and imagine that you're driving across Antarctica. You begin on a flat, white plain, and you watch the landscape go by. It's so unchanging, it's hypnotizing, and you notice changes only when you look away for a second and then refocus. The ground gets rougher, maybe slopes. Something appears on the horizon, mountains in the distance. The angle of the sun changes, and with it the quality of the light. It's actually that last bit that is closest to the experience Dunn provides on his best extended works. If you were to watch the same spot on the ground all day, its appearance would vary greatly over time, but not in such a way that you'd register the changes as distinct moments when something was suddenly different.
It may seem as though I'm comparing listening to his music to watching paint dry (and to some people, that's probably what the glacially shifting 17-minute drone "Butel" will seem like), but it really is interesting, involving music for fans of ambient drone. The sound sources for this music are brass, strings, and guitar, plus piano on a couple of short tracks, but it's hard to distinguish which source you're hearing at any given time because Dunn uses a computer to thoroughly distend, reshape, and smear these sounds until they result in new timbres of his own creation.
Four of the 12 pieces on Young Person's Guide originally appeared on the download-only album Fervency (the "young person's guide" title of this release seems like a self-conscious joke about our instant-archive culture, and may also be a King Crimson reference), and they're here inserted into a massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures. The eight extra tracks are from the same sessions that produced Fervency, and they are far from padding. I think this actually works better than that album precisely because of its much longer running time, and the shorter, more active pieces on the entirely new second disc help balance the longest, stillest tracks. There is a certain element to this supremely patient music that requires immersion for the listener to really draw maximum satisfaction from it, and positioning these four familiar tracks as a much more expansive work accomplishes that. Think Stars of the Lid's sprawling double-disc albums for a point of comparison.
I don't think Dunn's work here will do much to pull in listeners who haven't enjoyed drone music in the past-- it's too committed to the form and takes stasis too seriously for that-- but for drone fans this stuff is catnip. On the second disc especially, the injection of muted broadcast samples and rougher textures offers a welcome evolution of Dunn's style, one that he's also tentatively explored on the Rural Route No. 2 EP. As an expansion of Fervency, Young Person's Guide fills in what in hindsight was a very incomplete picture of where Dunn was as an artist during the recording, and in the process becomes his definitive statement so far.
