Ways of Meaning

Ways of Meaning is a full length vinyl, digital download and art edition album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. It was recorded at Bunce Cake studios in Brooklyn by the composer in 2010. The recordings are mostly quiet songs that are shorter in length from his earlier material and the 2010 release, A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn. Interviews with the artist found that the songs were mainly recorded using guitar, laptop and organ as predominant sound sources - although touches of strings, choir, horns, and even electronic samples and textures are seemingly heard in certain songs. His music highly retains the spirit of contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt and like Pärt's music (usually just one or two very simple quiet lines of melody that either converge and crescendo to euphoric peaks, or just as easily end as plainly and hauntingly as they begin) there's an austere and meditative quality that is both oddly attractive and extremely powerful.

Critical Reaction
Delusions of Adequacy music journalist, Mark Lesseraux: Ways of Meaning opens with the short table setter (pun?) “Dropping Sandwiches In Chester Lake”. The track features long, shifting cloud-patch guitar swells which overlap delicately creating a gently layered entrance point. “Sandwiches” gives way quickly to the first liturgical solar rays of “Statuit”, a nine and a half minute echo drenched piece which conjures images of an early morning sun shining through an empty cathedral’s stained-glass windows. “Canyon Meadows”, “New Pures” and “Movement For The Completely Fucked” make up the chest, abdomen and sex (pun again?) of the record. In these three middle pieces, Dunn brings in more dissonant tones which nicely offset “Statuit’s” gentle inviting qualities. The sixth and final track on the record is “Touhy’s Theme”, an austerely reflective sign off which leaves the listener floating adrift rather than returning her safely “home”. Which is a good thing, because if we are talking about locating Ways of Meaning in our world today it is certain that the old comfort zones, the old stand by’s, the old “givens” need to be questioned and if necessary in certain cases abandoned. Kyle Bobby Dunn is aware of this fact, and his music conveys it definitively, and quite beautifully.

New Artillery's Sebastian Stirling relished the album, writing: "Each of Ways of Meaning’s six pieces offers a unique arrangement of those intersecting sets of concentric circles. “Canyon Meadows” stands out with the close proximity of its drones, which brush against each other like reeds in the wind. But the album’s centerpiece is the fifteen-minute-long “Movement for the Completely Fucked,” which loses all track of time as it gradually ebbs and flows with volume swells and overlapping tones. Without a watch you could mistake it for one of its five-minute-long neighbors. These specific pieces are the highlights of Ways of Meaning, but as my six full spins of the album will attest, it’s remarkably easy to get lost in this album.

The Liminal wrote: "Dunn’s drones make patent that quality in a way that so much post-noise work, encrusted with sonic ornament and desperate not to bore the listener, does not; they maintain fealty to the qualities of classic post-La Monte Young drone-music, of flattening out rhythm as far as possible so the horizon of the Song seems to stretch on infinitely, of finding its interest in close-focus on the detail of the moment, augmented by the depth and complexity allowed by electronic instruments. But just as drone is dependent on time, so it remakes and estranges our sense of it: we’re aware of time’s passage, but not in the sense of its disappearance; instead, the sound keeps us in the present moment, expands it until it seems to contain far more than it should, until, in fact, it is difficult to say whether it is passing at all: all time is still accessible.

Ned Raggett, writing for the All Music Guide, stated: On his early 2011 album, Kyle Bobby Dunn continues exploring his favored areas of drone-centered composition and performance -- though not without humor, as song titles like "Dropping Sandwiches (In Chester Lake)" and "Movement for the Completely Fucked" show. The former song starts the album with the kind of classically post-ambient Brian Eno/Aphex Twin/Stars of the Lid atmosphere that begs to be heard while stretched out and perfectly still, the slowest of melodies and the softest of tones but still using hooks as such to create its impact. From there Ways of Meaning moves forward in generally similar vein, with one of its key elements -- much like that of the noted forebears -- being the inclusion of bass-heavy rumble as much as gossamer glaze in the sonics, though the latter often prevails. But that hint of edge, of literal weight, adds to the collage of tones on a piece like "Canyon Meadows" or acts as an undertow on the flow of "New Pures," helping to transform that feeling of contemplation while not actually crushing it in any sense. As for "Movement for the Completely Fucked" itself, it's as gently enveloping as one could want, 15 minutes of a similarly understated hook-as-such impact as the opening piece and beautifully done every step of the way, building to a exultant conclusion.

This breathtaking work is at the top of my list as one of the most gorgeous ambient albums of all time. A modern classic.

Track listing

 * Side A
 * 1) "Dropping Sandwiches (In Chester Lake)" - 3:54
 * 2) "Statuit" – 5:32
 * 3) "Canyon Meadows" – 7:03
 * 4) "New Pures" – 4:06


 * Side B
 * 1) "Movement for the Completely Fucked" - 14:52
 * 2) "Touhy's Theme" - 5:03

External links & reviews

 * Review; "Anti-Gravity Bunny"
 * Review; "The Milk Factory"
 * Review; "Fluid Radio"
 * Review; "ATTN Magazine"
 * Review; "Cyclic Defrost"
 * Review; "Textura"
 * Review; "Muso's Guide
 * Interview; Facts Raw at Fluid Radio
 * Review; "The Death of CDs"
 * Review; "Just Press Play"
 * Review; "Middle Class White Noise"
 * Review; "Textura"
 * Review; "The Liminal"
 * Review; "musicAddicted"
 * Review; Brainwashed
 * Review; One Thirty BPM
 * Review; Huffington Post