- PERILS is Canada's Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Seattle-based Benoit Pioulard, two artists with plenty in common. Both make ambient music soaked in romance and nostalgia, and both hit career peaks with guitar-led albums in the past two years: Dunn's extraordinary And The Infinite Sadness, Pioulard's Sonnet. But in some ways their approach is fundamentally different. Dunn has, over the course of his career, slowly refined a single musical approach. Pioulard's tastes are more open-ended, and can err towards tweeness.
This tendency sometimes mars PERILS, the pair's first collaborative LP. The music box rendition of "Unchained Melody" that opens "Maps Of Sinking" sets the teeth on edge; fortunately, it's soon washed away by a dense drone that, as per the track's title, drags us further and further into the depths. Elsewhere, Pioulard, whose roots are in folksy song-form as much as in ambient music, can be an awkward singer in the album's clouded moods. "(Dead In The) Creekbed Blues" sounds just about raddled enough to work, but jangly ballad "Resin" sits uneasily in this context.
The album was reportedly made by Pioulard sending "sonic puzzle pieces" to Dunn, who would add his own material on top, and sometimes this process is audible. At the end of "Leveled," in particular, Dunn's lambent guitar enters like an unexpected (but extremely welcome) guest. The pair find a stabler middle ground elsewhere. Opener "Colours Hide My Face" is a majestic squall of sound, and "La Brume"'s tranquil melody plays out over a backdrop of crashing waves (or is that radio static?). The plucked tones on "It Was Going Great. Until It Wasn't." have a directness that's rare for Dunn, but float in an ambient soup more limpid than you might expect from Pioulard. Given the nature of these artists' work, their solo recordings were always going to shine brightest, but PERILS is an intriguing and sometimes beautiful collaboration.
Tracklist01. Colours Hide My Face
02. (Dead In The) Creekbed Blues
03. Leveled
04. Resin
05. La Brume
06. Maps Of Sinking
07. Flaw
08. The Unbecoming
09. All That's Left
10. It Was Going Great. Until It Wasn't.