“Remember the quiet moments.” I do; sometimes, it seems, too well, so that they seem to be the only genuine ones: warm afternoons with the windows open to traffic, or winter nights, noise damped by snow – when the world recedes to a hum. The records that enhance and preserve those tracts when time seemed to turn slow and malleable – Eno, Emeralds, Returnal, In a Silent Way, Henry Flynt’s You Are My Ever-Lovin’, Richard Youngs’ Advent – that you have playing in the corner of the room as your breathing slows: I keep them by me, almost against my better judgement. Thus: the opening ‘Dropping Sandwiches (In Chester Lake)’, which starts from synth drones that slowly creep into audibility, and sings lowly like bowed metal for nearly 4 minutes – not precisely placid, troubled by the slight grain of its burnished surface and wavering motion, an ambivalence that Dunn advances throughout Ways of Meaning. His fifth full-length release – although it’s difficult to tell among the flurry of tapes, CD-Rs and downloads he’s put out in his prodigious (at 24, two years my senior) career – extends and continues the work compiled on last year’s A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, although the shapes and textures here are consistently synthetic, as opposed to previous works for guitar, piano, strings and other instruments. Gone, to some extent, are the harsh, granular highs of some of Six Cognitive Works: though the music seethes at times with currents of activity, the tempo remains almost glacial, the tone aching and coppery; the album hits its white-light peaks only in the ebb and swirl of ‘Canyon Meadows’ and the steady, darkly resonant, skyscraping middle passage of ‘Movement For the Completely Fucked’.

The drone, obviously, is a durational form: its substance exists only in the unfolding or the renewal of sound-events, the continual production of vibrations whose very qualities are dependent on their frequency of repetition in a particular space or time. 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. The unadorned quality of Dunn’s work on this release doesn’t make it austere: the shape and quality of these pieces possess the organic rightness of, say, John Cage’s early works for piano; it reminds me most of Birchville Cat Motel’s Gunpowder Temple of Heaven – quieter and less intoxicatingly dissonant, but possessed of the same baroque severity and inexhaustible, thrilling stasis. These pieces take time – as might be expected – to become acclimatised to, to work their way into your system, but they are, without reservation, works of pleasure, closing down the distance between the church-bell’s thunder and the lover’s whisper: the threat of solipsism that haunts experimental music is once again exorcised here.

Roland Barthes: “Fulfilments: they are not spoken – so that, erroneously, the amorous relation seems reduced to a long complaint. This is because, if it is inconsistent to express suffering badly, on the other hand, with regard to happiness, it would be culpable to spoil its expression… when I am fulfilled or remember having been so, language seems pusillanimous”. They defeat articulation, those quiet moments. Dunn seems almost to admit as much on the 5-minute glide of closer ‘Touhy’s Theme’, where core drone hardly rises above a confidential exchange, and where the shadows of doubt that haunted ‘Statuit’ and ‘Movement…’ are resolved into an undisturbed and patient quiet. It stops, and I hardly notice: it blurs into the traffic outside my window. The world arrives, and we are still listening.

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