Kyle Bobby Dunn is a Canadian composer, arranger, and live performer of modern compositional and guitar based drone music. He has performed in live and exclusive outdoor settings, including Banff National Park, since 2000 and has released music on various international recording labels. His work has been described as "compositions that are patience incarnate" and "encourage an emotional response even as its seemingly infinite, creeping swirl and hum threatens to numb. A difficult feat." It is music that often "captures a mood somewhere between sadness and strength; it's the sound of a respite that occurs after having survived an ordeal; it's sound as memory, as memorial." The austere, tempered tonal shifts featured in many of his compositions subtly echo the work of minimalist forerunners like Morton Feldman and LaMonte Young. At the same time Dunn occasionally intersperses quaint, almost chamberal touches which evoke more traditionally classical sources.
First realized in Calgary, Alberta, Dunn started composing and arranging his music for homemade films mostly on piano and cassette tapes in the late 1990s. His first love was filmmaking and it was film music that initially attracted him to composing his own works. He began performing and recording under the names 'Subtract by Two' and Kyle Bobby Dunn with the first self-released album, Music for Medication around 2002–2003. In interviews he has often mentioned large admiration for classical and soundtrack composers including Arvo Pärt, Valentin Silvestrov, John Williams, Ennio Morricone and Jerry Fielding, yet his own music often exhibits a more quiet, minimalist, and droning nature that is often compared to ambient contemporary musicians William Basinski, Brian Eno and Stars of the Lid. Releasing what he has referred to as his 'first proper full length' album, Fragments & Compositions of Kyle Bobby Dunn, on Boston's Sedimental label in 2008. The album covered several years of his earliest compositional works, mainly for strings and piano. In early 2010, a long form album that filled a double compact disc set containing five years worth of his music, A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, arrived on the UK based label Low Point, and was praised in various music journalism and considered a 'deeply affecting' work by The New York Times. He released Ways of Meaning in 2011 on Buffalo, New York imprint, Desire Path Recordings, to unanimously positive reception. The Huffington Post's Daniel Kushner wrote, "Dunn presents the listener with sounds that seemingly, have no beginning, nor any end. There are not so much melodies, in the conventional sense – but rather an economical assemblage of tones, which linger in the air like the quivering brush strokes in an Impressionist still life." In 2012 he released another double disc set of long form works on the Low Point label. Bring Me the Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn was recorded at the artist's Bunce Cake studio and throughout remote locations in his native Canada. The recordings revealed a most personal and deeply emotional aspect of the composer's work and reached a high standard for electronically produced and arranged music – only utilizing an electric guitar and loop pedal for the album's 15 songs. The disc received a largely positive response and was heralded by Resident Advisor as being among his finest work. In addition to the massive double disc release of 2012, a five song vinyl record was released later in the year on the Toronto label, Komino. It was considered as "a tightening of the composer's sound – the signature elements are there; cyclical patterns, drifts of spidery drones, buried static, but though they somehow seem slower and more stately than before, they seem focused, resolute" and "in a quiet master class in poised composition; constantly in motion, and in perfect stillness" by John Boursnell at UK's Fluid Radio. In mid 2014 his released his largest full-length release album to date, 'Kyle Bobby Dunn & The Infinite Sadness.' The album is artist's largest and most emotionally complex release with many of the previous guitar laden sounds of previous releases stretched out to long crescendos and intricate melodic development. The release is available on the triple vinyl and double compact disc formats.
