Zero gravity dance music for lonely cosmonauts. Or utopian jazz for the spiritually dazed. Interstellar beach techno? I don’t know. I’m calling it Astral Blues.
I like to think of it as a fever dream night out on the town, in love and half-crazed, blurred under neon lights and bursting with energy, connected to the earth and the heavens and all that hormonal stuff that makes us feel larger than life, self-mythologizing the way forward.
Before this year, Kyle Bobby Dunn’s singular shade of ecstatic ambient drone music managed to flit by in the periphery of my tastes. His album releases seemed like big occasions to many friends, but I only listened, it seemed, in the midst of ambient playlists and random spins through Spotify or Youtube. I always enjoyed what I heard, but my attention was swamped by the constant snowblind bliss of the experience – the entire point of listening to hours of ambient music at a time, lost in headphones.
For someone who wrote a list called the 32 best ambient albums ever made, I was hilariously surprised by how quickly I fell in love with his sound. The two tracks on this split LP, by Dunn and Wayne Robert Thomas, make a convincing case for the power of sustained ambient drone in the year 2018.
Optimistic Underground 