For a drone artist, the differences between one release and the next are often subtle. It comes with the territory. You make subtle music to begin with, and like any artist you feel the burden of not wanting to repeat yourself. Kyle Bobby Dunn clearly feels this burden. He's been making drone records since 2002, and since 2005 he's released a fairly steady stream of albums, EPs, limited cassettes, and other small-run recordings. So he's covered a lot of ground within his style already.
Ways of Meaning sticks to what we already know Dunn does well: patient drone. But it does it differently from anything he's released before. It's his least varied and most musically active album, though that's not quite as paradoxical as it may sound. Here, Dunn is focused on a certain type of rounded, pillow-soft tone that has the feel of cold, clear air, or in its more active moments, the play of light underwater. But there's a lot you can do with those types of sounds, and Dunn does a lot over 40 minutes. With one exception, he keeps the pieces short and homed-in on a single idea, leaving behind both the rougher, organic tones and the longer structures of much of his past work.
The album opens with a pair of pieces that move in opposite directions to explore dissonance and consonance. No music made with the sounds Dunn uses could ever be described as harsh, but "Dropping Sandwiches (in Chester Lake)" manages to make them slightly unsettling by combining them in strange harmonies. The purity of the tones and half-empty texture of the music have a strange effect on the dissonant harmony, though-- rather than coalescing into a sour chord, the notes seem to hang next to each other in gentle disagreement. Tones overlap on "Canyon Meadows" with a rhythm roughly equivalent to wind chimes-- there appears to be no set meter for the comings and goings of individual tones, but the clamor as they emerge and disappear still constitutes a harmonious whole.
The one long track, "Movement for the Completely Fucked", essentially stretches the rest of the album's approach across 15 slowly drifting minutes. "Drifting" is really the right word for it, too. When I think of more ballasted drone music, like that of Stars of the Lid, I think of "shifting," because those sounds seem like they'd take some effort to move. But these feel like they might blow away and drift forever if you let go. Ways of Meaning is drone music with a light touch and the gravity turned off.
